The US Navy gets sued for pirating $600 million worth of software

Bitmanagement, a German company that provides a 3D virtual reality program called BS Contact Geo, is suing the US government for illegally installing at least 558,466 copies of their program. The US Navy originally licensed 38 copies of the program for evaluation purposes, reports TorrentFreak. In their complaint, Bitmanagement states that they had disabled the DRM component that tracked the installation of the program and removed any sort of trial limitations to facilitate such testing. The Navy also disabled special software that was designed to keep track of the installations, preventing Bitmanagement from tracking the installations. Allegedly, the US Navy took advantage of the removal of restrictions to install the program on at least 558,466 computers. When you consider that the program costs $1,067 for every license (at the time it was installed) the licensing fees compute to about $600 million. The same program retails for $1,500 today. Negotiations for a volume license were apparently underway when the navy decided to go ahead and install the program on all their systems anyway. BS Contact Geo is a tool for analysing mapping data and converting it into a 3D space. Think of the program as offering Google Maps, but in 3D. The US military has been in trouble before. Apptricity had dragged them to court for the illegal installation and use of Apptricity’s troop and supply movement management program. The program was originally licensed for 5 servers and 150 devices, but the military quietly installed the system on 93 servers and over 9,000 devices. The total value of the illegal licenses was estimated to be around $250 million. This case was settled for $50 million after lengthy negotiations.