US Navy accused of pirating 3D virtual reality software, developer sues it for $600 million
US Navy and Piracy! you would never assume the world’s biggest navy to be using a pirated software but apparently, it does. According to a suit filed by German firm Bitmanagement, the US Navy has been allegedly using its 3D virtual reality software on a large number of devices without having sufficient licenses. The software-maker is now suing the government agency for a whopping $600 million.
The company, Bitmanagement, makes a 3D virtual reality program called BS Contact Geo. According to the complaint (PDF), Bitmanagement and the Navy agreed to a trial license of the software in 2011 and 2012. That agreement let the Navy use the program on 38 computers on a trial basis — to see if they liked it, to see if it was useful, to see if it could be integrated with other Naval systems, and so on.
However, the company later discovered that the software was deployed on nearly 558,466 computers by 2013. In addition to the unlawful usage, the software-maker also noticed that the Navy disabled a feature in the software that tracked duplicate installations of it.
The price of a single license of the software at the time of the agreement was around $1067, which translates to $596,308,103 for the additional installations carried out by the US Navy.Now Bitmanagement expects US Navy to either pay this amount or face a trial for causing damage to its business and violating copyright.
