US Navy Under Fire In Mass Software Piracy Lawsuit (torrentfreak.com) 121
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.
Oh, no! (Score:5, Funny)
Hundreds of millions of dollars? Where will the DoD get that kind of money?
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Hundreds of millions for climate mitigation? What planet do you live on?
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From the US taxpayers, and more debt.
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Can't do that, it's already full of IOUs disguised as T-bills.
Re:Oh, no! (Score:5, Funny)
Wait - the copyright lobby have yet to peer-review the maths involved. This will be complex because the plaintiff is German and not American, but I believe the formula they apply is something like:
sue_for_losses = (actual_losses + made_up_losses) * 1000
Then, because it's a German company:
america_first_weighting = 0.0001
sue_for_losses = sue_for_losses * america_first_weighting
Next up comes the political stuff:
sue_for_losses = apply_secret_sauce_no_one_understands(sue_for_losses)
By the time all that gets done, the German state will end up bailing out Bitmanagement so it can be pay the US government for misuse of their equipment.
Re:Oh, no! (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they can get the RIAA to do the math:
150k of statutory damages per willful infringement multiplied by 100k infringements makes 15 billion in statutory damages.
Which leads to the question of who do you call to repo a carrier group.
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Out of your pocket.
While I am of the opinion that the U.S. Spends too much on the military, and there is a lot of waste in the military that can probably be cleaned up with some efficiencies, and the fact that they pull the you need to pay us more money or else you will be sorry scheme irresponsible.
But this is just more money that will be wasted from our tax money and not go towards strengthening our military, paying our troops better salary. Or keeping us more secure.
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the whole point of damages is that the money is "wasted" by the defendant. if they got to keep it (after possibly a stern lecture), there'd be no incentive to follow the law.
the german company is not, of course, going to get $number_of_installs*$cost_of_license in the end. they're just starting there because they can and they probably don't have any more information. we'll see how this goes; hopefully there's a semi-reasonable explanation and a settlement. maybe the sysadmin who thought this was a good idea
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yes, this is the us military, you're right about that, and they'll throw whomever they need to under the bus, and if they complain about being thrown under the bus, they'll get a courts-martial instead of a warm and fuzzy civil trial. roflmao
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the whole point of damages is that the money is "wasted" by the defendant. if they got to keep it (after possibly a stern lecture), there'd be no incentive to follow the law.
The point of damages—restitution—is that the plaintiff is "made whole". Damages are not awarded to punish the plaintiff or to serve as a deterrent. Your actions damaged someone, so it's your responsibility to set things right. Punishment (retribution) is separate.
Of course, this is a copyright case, so the idea that there could be "damages" in any real sense is laughable. The production or distribution of unauthorized copies does not make the copyright holder any worse off than they were before.
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That depends on your jurisdiction. There is a well known concept of "punitive damage"
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it's not just copyright infringement, dude. the navy didn't go buy a copy of this software off-the-shelf at best buy. your arguments against prosecuting software piracy in the large are kinda silly when applied to a single organization with, presumably, a legitimate contractual relationship (not just a dumbass click-through EULA) with the vendor.
and, yes, paying someone to "make them whole" is wasting the money, unless you're the person being made whole. while i could have worded it better, your technical d
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"discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure."
There goes puberty. Abandon hope, all ye in 10th grade.
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They could try piracy. Sail the seven seas drinking, murdering and looking for booty, then selling it on the black market.
Better than the most heinous crime of software piracy.
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They could try piracy.
If you do it by yourself . . . you're a pirate.
If you do it in contract of a country . . . you're a privateer.
See Sir Francis Drake for details.
Sail the seven seas drinking, murdering and looking for booty, then selling it on the black market.
Booze is banned on US Navy ships. The other stuff is OK.
I can't image a French navy ship without a wine cellar, or a German navy ship without beer taps.
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we could use a few ships in working condition...
Godwin wins again (Score:1)
You'd call him an evil Nazi racist if he made Mexico pay for it....
I was already calling him a Nazi before he was elected.
Wow, so you're saying that he was Godwinized even before the election.
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.
Re: Godwin wins again (Score:1)
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.
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Illustrating what I said: all useful discussion has concluded. It's all random insults now.
Anonymous [Re: Godwin wins again] (Score:2)
https://www.penny-arcade.com/c... [penny-arcade.com]
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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).
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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.
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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.
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> 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
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Your argument would be cogent if people who oppose Trump believed Mexico would pay for the wall. The thing is, I think almost nobody believed Mexico would pay for the wall, even people who applauded when he said that. They were applauding the sentiment, not endorsing the belief.
This is classic bullshit. Bullshit is a lie that isn't for believing, it's for going along with.
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the parent wasn't referring so much to Trump, as to his cuck followers who'll hang on every word to the point of pirouetting to keep up with the "danger of the day" while Hillary still roams freely, the Wall festers, and, presumably, Comet Pizza is still rounding up innocent children to rape and sell. really, it's hilarious in a way; at least our representatives get a measly chunk of pocket change in exchange for their flexible interests, while the "capitalist" "Christian" plebs sell their birthright for a
How does it taste? (Score:4, Funny)
As an American I hope this will teach the Us government to stop being douchebags about copywrite infringement. And about most everything else too.
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I'll just assume that the USTR will add the US to the Special 301 report, because we all know how important it is.
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It won't.
Been there, done that (Score:2, Interesting)
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 permi
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?
Clients connect to servers.
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The client software "out there" connects to the server in front of you in order to receive the service of presenting an interface to the user.
If more will contemplate that, they will expand their thinking and possibly even feel empowered. A server is not some mysterious thing "out there" beyond the reach of a mere mortal. It's just another computer that may not even be as powerful as the one on their desk.
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That's because the others have your local machine connect out to the remote machine. The machine that listens for connections is the server. The machine that initiates the connection is the client.
Contemplate that and expand your understanding.
Re:Been there, done that (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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No, your understanding is backwards.
The X server is where the display is happening ... the clients connect to the servers and ask them to display something for them.
The server is the thing which waits for requests from clients to do work on its behalf.
While the work may be happening on what is a server, and you consider yourself a client, in the X architecture, the
Remember Harvard Graphics? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
long history of govt fraud and theft (Score:1)
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
Re:Reinterpreting license agreements (Score:4, Interesting)
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"
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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
Why GFS is misleading. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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On bare copyright terms though, does that even make a difference? The restricted act is copying, not use or benefit.
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Or in the words of a whore, you don't have to sleep with me, you just have to pay me.
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Now vee... (Score:2)
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Over there, on the other side of the Atlantic.
why no, I didn't RTFA, why do you ask? (Score:4, Funny)
In the Navy?
That's a serious problem.
YAAAARRRRR!
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Load the guns and Put up the sweeps! Prepare to come about and PAY THE BILL or we will take possession of one of your ships!
Two points... (Score:2)
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 .
Re:Two points... (Score:4)
Re: Two points... (Score:2)
They got servers...
phone-home software in the navy (Score:2)
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?
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I assume that is how they know the navy had 100,000 installs of their software.
During the lawsuit the Navy stated they believed they had a license that would allow them to include this software in their standard PC deployment image and that the only restrictions were how many copies were running or in use at the same time.
During the court case, the Navy admitted it has deployed that particular standard system image hundreds of thousands of times since the software inclusion.
Re:phone-home software in the navy (Score:5, Informative)
Incorrect. They learned the scope of the problem through discovery and adjusted their claims to account for the much more massive copying (the original scope was just the single site where the trial happened). The DoD very much does not allow call home.
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Meh.. ostensibly they don't on classified networks, but the unclass network is pretty porous and network configuration varies widely. In any event, it must have leaked through somewhere in order to tip them off in the first place.
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My guess is one of those "whistle blower" things where they encourage you to turn in your company for violating software licenses for a reward was involved...
Obligatory Russian Reversal? (Score:4, Funny)
In Soviet America, the Navy are the Pirates?
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And in the free world, the pirates are the Navy?
Flex? (Score:2)
There has been this company called flex (someone else owns them now I think) that can control software usage in every way imaginable.
Good Argument for Open Source (Score:1)
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? daily (Score:2)
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? (Score:2)
blame the reseller with EULA BS? no an hard contract overrides any EULA
Estimates (Score:5, Insightful)
"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."
We don't know enough yet (Score:1)
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 su
Comcast should ... (Score:2)
... block the Navy's internet access.
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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,