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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.
Hundreds of millions of dollars? Where will the DoD get that kind of money?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As an American I hope this will teach the Us government to stop being douchebags about copywrite infringement. And about most everything else too.
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.
The Army bankrupted this company due to rampant piracy of their software.
That's the origin of the US GOV'T RESTRICTED RIGTS in the (c) messages.
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.
Now vee have zee Americans vhere vee vant dem.
Piracy?
In the Navy?
That's a serious problem.
YAAAARRRRR!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
1 - A hundred thousand workstations using VR software? This is a mainstream training tool now?
2 - We are relying on a German company for must now be military mission-critical software?
Clearly this is not a big deal. They should have bought and on-shored the company .
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
For some reason, I seem more concerned that the navy would allow some piece of software to phone-home to the company than the fact that they installed the software on multiple machines. I assume that is how they know the navy had 100,000 installs of their software.
Could the company then release an update that would essentially create a bot net of navy computers?
In Soviet America, the Navy are the Pirates?
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There has been this company called flex (someone else owns them now I think) that can control software usage in every way imaginable.
This whole thing is a good argument for open source in government. The money that the Navy is going to have to pay to this company could support far, far more software in the open source. yes, sometimes, things are very specific to a task and need to be custom / paid for in a proprietary setting. This is not one of those cases. There are multiple viewers for 3D applications which they can put anywhere.
so each reimgae counts as an install? Some systems are re-imaged daily.
Or do they count the software being in the software deployment system as an app listed for installation but not installed as being installed on each system?
blame the reseller with EULA BS? no an hard contract overrides any EULA
"We need to scope out this Bitmanagement deployment, Lieutenant. How many PCs will need it?"
"Several hundred thousand Sir".
"That's a lot of licenses, is there any way we can get by with fewer?"
"Well Sir, we could switch to a concurrent licensing model."
"How many would we need then?"
Scribble, scribble.
"I make it 38 Sir."
"That sounds better, we'll do that."
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"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The corollary to Godwin's law is "...and once the Hitler comparison is made, all useful discussion in the thread has terminated." That seems to be accurate.
Nope. It is actually a misconception that is more revealing about those who use it for an excuse to avoid discussion.
Wow, so you're saying that he was Godwinized even before the election.
Before the nineties. Like Hitler, Trump is a grandstanding blowhard with pretentious arrogance, a tendency to scam, and a lot of plagiarism in his works.
There are some differences. Hitler had a history of healthy eating, and a military service that reflected genuine courage rather than being a lard-ass that wolfs down fast food while boasting about feats of courage he would never perform.
All in all, Hitler was probably a better person than Trump.
The devil's probably in the details of the contract's wording.
That's probably not the Navy's fault. That's an issue between the vendor and reseller if the Navy only made their deal with the reseller.
There are different ways to say the same thing. I suspect the contract is vague, which will come down to a judge's or jury's interpretation.
Table-ized A.I.
Illustrating what I said: all useful discussion has concluded. It's all random insults now.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
... block the Navy's internet access.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You seem to be overlooking something like murdering and torturing 6 million people of a specific ethnicity, simply for being that ethnicity and posing no actual violent threat to the state or breaking any laws. But you go ahead and find admirable things about Hitler, that's just great.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/c...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You are just whining because you are unwilling to think. Those are clearly not random insults and you know it. They are insults based on reasons (that reasonable people can agree or disagree with), mixed with a bit too much hyperbole (for my taste).
lol... Trump's legendary bigotry and racism, the meat and potatoes of CNN and HuffPost, and the choice strawman arguments of SJWs everywhere.
You ascribe malice to what is just ignorance or simplicity.
It doesn't burn, it just kind of tickles.
BTW, I've seen some of A.H's paintings, they were really fairly amateur.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
FWIW, I think this happened under one of the Bushes. I seem to remember that this suit was originally filed quite a long time ago.
OTOH, it could be just so similar to something that happened back then, that I've confused things. But it's not unusual for legal cases to take a long time. SCOx vs IBM may not be settled yet.
That said, the summary indicates that this happened under Obama. And that's certainly possible. It just seems like something I read about a really long time ago. If someone said Regan, I'd've said "Well, not quite that long ago.".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Remember PROMIS?
(not that PROMIS, the older one-"Prosecutors Management and Information System".)
A bit of software for mainframes and minis, that was comissioned by the US govt but never paid for. It was capable of reading/writing any database or record system at the time. The US govt, instead of paying for the software, instead of complying with court orders, destroyed the company, subverted bankruptcy proceedings to ensure the company was killed off. It likely cost the govt more to do this than to pay the company.
This software was modified to add a backdoor and then sold by the govt to other nations. A spy tool.
Who can you trust if not the government?
I'm not at all the Army, but decades ago we had 2,000 PCs across 2 campuses, with like 600 copies of MS Word and Excel. (Not the Office bundle, individual copies.)
With my manager and their manager (CIO) supporting me, we installed Funk (yep, look up Sideways for dot-matrix printers) AppMeter on our Novell v3 servers. I could track exactly who and how many people were running it at one time (it was the "boob curve" -- usage tracking during the day showed a large startup at 8, big drop-off at 5 , with a 2/3rd drop-off at noon. Yes, I was an adolescent.)
If you weren't connected to the server, you didn't run it -- the software was installed locally but the actual executable was located on the server and it was counted and metered, so if you hit it at max I got an report and YOU got a "Try Later" prompt.
Also we ran software reporting -- I got the signature data direct from the BSA. Ran it, looked at the report, and called and complained to high heaven.
"Look, I'm scanning 2K PCs, but checking this just on my PC and I absolutely *know* there is software on it you're not reporting on."
"Oh, well, our clients are too busy to always give us valid signatures to detect their software."
"Look, we try to be honest. I'm using your software for our internal audits to make sure we're valid. Don't come complaining to me if you come in later and find things that your software won't locate for us." Reported this to my boss, we soon got a different and better scanner. BSA's was free but not worth what we could have paid for it.
We tried to make sure everything was on the up-and-up. I'm sure we weren't actually pure at 100% but we tried hard to get there. Oh, and MS was NOT happy with us running their software metered on the server, but we had our lawyers look at the software licence and (at that time) it was a valid configuration -- the OFFICE suite wasn't, but the individual copies were. Or at least they told us to go ahead and (didn't expect to but) were willing to go to court to defend us, which was good enough.
Back on topic, I think there's something wrong there too, but it's not like they literally COULDN'T have done it that way. They'd just need to provide actual configs and logs over time as proof.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
> The corollary to Godwin's law is "...and once the Hitler comparison is made, all useful discussion in the thread has terminated." That seems to be accurate.
Please, that is really not a corollary to the law, which in its original form claims that in any online discussion, there will inevitably be a comparison to Nazis. Mike Godwin made no claims that the comparison would be invalid, or that this was automatically the end of useful discussion. These added rules seem to be less effective and less powerful than the original rule. They are also often used as much to silence discussion as the original comparison is often used to horrify and end discussion.