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US Navy Denies Pirating Software on 550K Computers, Says It Had Bought Licenses For 38 Machines (arstechnica.com)
Earlier this year, the U.S. Navy was accused of pirating 3D software after testing a software package offered by Germany company Bitmanagement Software GmbH. The company had sued the United States of America for nearly $600 million. The U.S. Navy has now responded to the accusations, saying that though it did install the aforementioned software on "hundreds of thousands of computers within its network" without paying the German software maker for it, it did so with the consent of the software producer. Many might disagree, however. From a report on ArsTechnica: The Navy says that it could use the software on hundreds of thousands of computers with licenses for 38 machines. The Navy denied that a procurement official "acknowledged that additional licenses were necessary for it to distribute BS Contact Geo to its users." The government admitted that it had purchased 38 licenses, but "denies that the software licenses were 'limited,' as alleged by Plaintiff."
It seems pretty unlikely that less than 0.1% of the total installations would be used at any given point in time. I mean, you can install on multiple machines to make things easier and faster, but THAT MANY?
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It doesn't matter if they were used or not. It is copying that is restricted by copyright law and requires a violation not use, you can use copyrighted material however you like copyright grants no control over that to the software producer. They could have burned 40 copies of the disk and stuck them on a shelf gathering dust and still be guilty of 39 copyright violations (you get one backup under fair use provisions, you lose it in practice under the DMCA if they've used copy protection on it thought).
Yeah, when deployed, seats cannot be pinging the internet over a ship's intranet (and the severely limited internet connection), it's seen as a security threat, and from my own experience working on the NMCI contract, vendors WILL hear about it.
Technically, as it's the Navy, they would be Marines which for some reason people forget are actually part of the Navy and not a separate branch.
Not for almost 200 years, if this is to be believed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
In 1834, the United States Marine Corps came under the Department of the Navy.[46] Historically, the Navy has had a unique relationship with the USMC, partly because they both specialize in seaborne operations. Together the Navy and Marine Corps form the Department of the Navy and report to the Secretary of the Navy. However, the Marine Corps is a distinct, separate service branch[47] with its own uniformed service chief – the Commandant of the Marine Corps, a four-star general.
Oracle tried to do this when I was ATT Wireless, we had a site license for oracle. When we ran a contact address book with multiple users, oracle tried to make us pay per server, then tried pay per user for millions of users. Oracle kept calling me in operations to try to get me to pay, I passed it onto legal and they smacked the shit outta them.
We had a great deal, 5 or so million a year for an unlimited license, and you can believe me, everywhere a database was needed, we ran mostly oracle.
(This was 10+ years ago, so Who knows now)