How's this for irony? US Navy hit with $600m software piracy claim A German software developer has accused the United States Navy of illegally copying $596m worth of its product. Bitmanagement Software GmbH claims that the Navy has copied "hundreds of thousands" of copies of its 3D modeling and tracking software BS Contact Geo without paying. They have filed suit [PDF] in the US Court of …
«Godwin's Law on the very first comment!» You seem to have missed the not irrelevant point, TonyJ, that the OP, Grade%, was not him or herself comparing anybody to Herr Hitler, merely surmising what the US Navy was likely to say when caught with its collective pants down....
Henri
Extrapolating my limited US Navy experience, there's at least one 2-star+ General/Admiral (retired, or if active, his or her brother-in-law) that has billed (and been paid by) the US Government for the $600m plus up to the usual 400% markup. Plus labour. And insisted that the contract be signed at their daughter's $90 prix fixe clapboard waffle house restaurant.
But $1 - $3 billion is still way cheaper than any of the many failed Navy software projects. My favourite bit is how the projects always move to and restart from scratch in different colour states/bases depending on which party is in power. If the palace guards don't miscount votes properly and declare Trump emperor, a lot of free-8-year-project-extention cards are going to fail to auto-renew (not that Clinton wouldn't renew them for a cut).
This should be interesting. Back before I retired and left all the BS behind, we had an IBM audit that, as I recall it, uncovered a moderate number of violations. The agency where I worked was fairly careful, but hadn't locked down all the desktops and install disks to ensure against license misbehavior. On the other hand, the Navy had engaged in a many year, many billion dollar network security initiative with EDS to secure their network, an exercise that I vaguely recall went years and billions over, and drove those who needed to interface with their systems a bit nuts. It was close to impossible to get arrangements in place to transfer data in or out of their network; in the light of this suit, it's tempting to think that might have been intended to keep others from knowing what went on inside.
So, Bitmanagement Software Goombah dropped their pants and got buggered. By the Navy. Yeah, who would've seen that one coming.
If the goddamned Germans would just pay attention to stereotypes, these types of things would never happen.
Oh goodie.... more grist for the election mills... Let's see.. Obama will get blamed. The Dems will blame it on the Republicans in Congress, and so on, so forth... ad nauseum. Personally... I think the government ought to just cut them a check and say "oops, our lousy post office didn't deliver the bill".
Weird. From the USN currently has only 330,000 personnel (plus about 100,000 reservists). I wouldn't have thought that they all needed a computer, nor that they'd all need such software installed. Even taking into account servers and specialist application workstations and so forth I wouldn't have thought there would be 500,000+ computers in total.
Unless it was included in a group deployment package or something?
Anyone with a requirement for NIPRNET access (pretty much everyone) would have a computer for that. That would include quite a few civilian employees in addition to active duty Navy and possibly Marine Corps personnel. Reserve military personnel with a training requirement have .mil email addresses, but do not necessarily have computers, although reserve centers would have a fair number scattered about, as do ships and other installations.
Anyone with SIPRNET access would have a second computer for that.
The nearly 560K computers probably is less that the total Navy inventory, maybe by quite a lot.
I'm not sure what the law says about the distinction, but if for example by mistake Adobe Acrobat was added to every laptop in a large organization, when the intent was to provide them Adobe Reader and only graphics design department actually used Acrobat I would hope they couldn't be found liable for the full whack due to a mistake from a low level flunky.
Obviously the $600m bill is just the starting point in negotiations, and if they didn't intend to put on everyone's image they'll remove it from those who don't need it and negotiate for the what they really owe plus some damages for installing it more widely for a time. Or if they do all use it hopefully they can get a volume discount, what with a half a million installs and all...
"a volume discount, what with a half a million installs and all..."
That was probably the original intention, but since they didn't pay even that, good will goes out the window. I'm surprised the starting sum wasn't at least double. A US company would certainly be asking for a hell of a lot more as a starting sum for negotiations, eg compensation, willfull act etc. More than likely the USN will end up paying the original volume licence price plus a little something extra for the cockup.
The Navy has their own special hammers. they are stainless steel, so they don't rust from all the water, and like NASA hammers they have the wrist strap and rope so you don't drop it over the side of the boat, and of coarse cost more and NASA hammers, because you know rust and stuff.
"...and of course cost more and NASA hammers..."
...because NASA is just a bunch of fly boys, and the Navy needs to have better hammers than the Air Force. If they didn't... then... Well, the Russians would just come in and take over with their superior hammers.
Er... Wait. It's not the Russians now? Well, then who's the real enemy the Navy is fighting against today? Beside the Army and Air Force, of course.
'The United States Government has been an active participant in protecting the rights of copyright owners. When the Business Software Alliance (BSA) conducts a raid, Federal Marshals or local law enforcement officers also participate. Federal Judges have shown their intolerance of copyright violators by handling down increasingly large damage awards against infringer’s.'
'United States law prohibits duplicating software for profit, making multiple copies for use by different users within an organization, and giving an unauthorized copy to another individual. If caught with pirated software, you or your company may be tried under both civil and criminal law.'
'A civil action may be instituted for injunction, actual damages (including infringer's profits), or statutory damages up to $100,000 per infringement. Criminal penalties for copyright infringement include fines up to $250,000 and jail terms up to five years, or both.'
"Clearly a 3D meeting is one where time stands still - one of those meetings that seems interminably long, with pointless points on the agenda agenda and lots of AOB - Any old Bollocks?"
- That's all office meetings that I can remember, even the teleconferenced ones. Vitally important to include the fourth dimension.
Better still invite participants from all dimension, hopefully some of them are brain-suckers or soul-suckers, it'd be a relief (actually I usually feel sucked dry after some meetings, so maybe that already happens).
Damnit, now I thinking of Sapphire and Steel and the original Time Machine Movie....
All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.
WTF is a 3D meeting? Do you mean all these boring meetign I've been sitting through for years have been in 2D?
I'm sure a lot of US Navy personnel can ask that, as can victims of their meetings. Unless something's changed radically in the past 3-4 years the Navy (and rest of DoD) liked their meeting presentations in Power Point (or .pdf slideshows converted from Power Point). And they liked many other things in Power Point, including engineering and progress reports that never belonged in such formats.
So even if the Navy has enough computers to put 558,466 copies of this software on - I saw the posts about the number of personnel and users of Navy computers - I have trouble believing there's so many copies in use. Or if the users are even aware it exists on their computers.
Though, to rebut myself, my employer is always trying to roll out trendy new collaborative tools like TV told them cool Millennials are using: wikis, sharepoints, chat rooms, forums, etc. All the engineers just keep using email and phone calls, and probably couldn't name half the communication tools that've been installed in the past five years.
'During that time, Bitmanagement says it disabled the copy-protection software on BS Geo at the Navy's request.'
Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahaaaaahahahahahahaha!!! <cough cough ackkk>
WTF did Bitmanagement think was going to happen? The US Navy, just like every other organization, have these animated two-legged noisy things called 'humans', and they do stuff like that. All the time.
Indeed. What the hell were they thinking ?
"Hello, could you please deactivate your protection for the trial ?"
"But of course, right away" replied no salesperson ever. Deactivate protection ? WHY ? Pay the licenses, you'll have the app and it will be legally protected.
I would have liked to be a fly on the wall of that meeting.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
