Software company wins $154k for US Navy's licensing breach
Court lands on less than the millions asked for after sailors made copies of 3D modeling suite 'hundreds of thousands' of times.
According to the vendor's
, BS Contact Geo is an extensible 3D viewer that "enables you to visualize and interact with state of the art 2D/3D content," based on digital data captured from "various sources (land surveys, CAD, satellite imagery, airborne laser scanning etc)".
Following the trial program, the software developer said that it was led to believe the Navy was going to expand the use of BS Geo by purchasing additional licenses for a large-scale deployment in 2013. During that time, Bitmanagement said it disabled the copy protection software on BS Contact Geo at the Navy's request.
Between 2013 and 2015, while negotiations for the licenses were ongoing, Bitmanagement claims the
Navy proceeded to distribute and reinstall BS Contact Geo on at least 558,466 machines, despite only having paid for the initial 38 licenses.
"The government knew or should have known that it was required to obtain a license for copying Bitmanagement software onto each of the devices that had Bitmanagement software installed," the complaint charged.
Looks like the US Navy may be...a piracy haven.