US Navy Under Fire In Mass Software Piracy Lawsuit (torrentfreak.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In 2011 and 2012, the U.S. Navy began using BS Contact Geo, a 3D virtual reality application developed by German company Bitmanagement. The Navy reportedly agreed to purchase licenses for use on 38 computers, but things began to escalate. While Bitmanagement was hopeful that it could sell additional licenses to the Navy, the software vendor soon discovered the U.S. Government had already installed it on 100,000 computers without extra compensation. In a Federal Claims Court complaint filed by Bitmanagement two years ago, that figure later increased to hundreds of thousands of computers. Because of the alleged infringement, Bitmanagement demanded damages totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. In the months that followed both parties conducted discovery and a few days ago the software company filed a motion for partial summary judgment, asking the court to rule that the U.S. Government is liable for copyright infringement. According to the software company, it's clear that the U.S. Government crossed a line. In its defense, the U.S. Government had argued that it bought concurrent-use licenses, which permitted the software to be installed across the Navy network. However, Bitmanagement argues that it is impossible as the reseller that sold the software was only authorized to sell PC licenses. In addition, the software company points out that the word "concurrent" doesn't appear in the contracts, nor was there any mention of mass installations. The full motion brings up a wide range of other arguments as well which, according to Bitmanagement, make it clear that the U.S. Government is liable for copyright infringement.

Comments

Been there, done that

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. I can remember, many moons ago, when Siebel sold very expensive licenses for MRI software on SGI hardware. They were quite miffed to discover that I had ported VNC to SGI IRIX, in order to allow clinicians to access the box remotely and use the software rather than buying each their own SGI Indigo box each with their own license. That was in.... dear lord, that was back in 2000. They were *miffed*, but I couldn't find anywhere in the licensing that forbade remote access.

Now, I would *not* want to permit that on Navy computers, because remote X sessions with the fairly poor non-"/bin/login" password handling of VNC is.... well it's dangerous, and can leave idle non-managed sessions lying around for crackers to abuse. But it can be really useful, especially for clients that don't have a built-in X server. And yes, X servers and clients have the names backwards.

Re:Been there, done that

[rickb928]

Many more moons before that, when you were limited to dialup connections, we set up tunnels for authorized clients, RADIUS and all. The stated purpose was to enable radiologists about 100 miles away to access the Solaris machines and read radiology images for diagnosis.

Imagine our surprise when we saw connections (logging ANI for auditing) originating from India.

Imagine further surprise when Sun tried to shut this down, claiming they were constrained from delivering the software offshore due to encryption and munitions regulations.

Several lawyers later they went away, very disappointed in missing out on not only the licensing for few hundred thousand new end-users, but also for the licensing they missed out on when we figured out how other hospitals could share imaging and use our teleradiology services for the cost of a long-distance call. Which got cheaper when we partnered with a nascent DSL provider (NOT the ILEC, mind you), and they got AOL on the side.

Good times. that odd adapter with the 02DEADBEEF20 MAC address drove me crazy for a few hours, though. And the infiltration of Ethernet into my pristine Token-Ring network, with all the joy that brought.

Why GFS is misleading.

[Anonymous Coward]

Delightfully missing in TFS is that a library, not linked to any executable software, was on a common desktop image. Not an executable, much less a runnable installation.

Re:Reinterpreting license agreements

[Immerman]

I'm curious, how do you get from "bought software for use on 38 machines" to installing it on 100,000 while "the number of active licenses doesn't exceed the ones it bought"