Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, Nov. 24 (Xinhua)-- the U.S. Navy was found guilty of piracy and ordered to pay $154400 (about 1.104 million yuan) to a software company.

CTOnews.com learned that a company called Bitmanagement Software GmbH filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Navy as early as 2016, accusing the military of copyright infringement. The company claims it licensed 38 copies of the 3D virtual reality software BS Contact Geo, but when negotiating additional licenses, the Navy installed the software on at least 558466 machines between 2013 and 2015.

In court documents, Bitmanagement claimed: "the U.S. Navy installed BS Contact Go on hundreds of thousands of computers without our prior knowledge or consent. We do not license or otherwise authorize the use of its software, and the Navy has never compensated Bitmanagement for its use."

The company sued the U.S. Navy for "intentional copyright infringement". According to the supplier's website, the software is a 3D browser that can visualize and interact with state-of-the-art 2D / 3D content based on digital data captured from various sources (land surveys, CAD, satellite images, airborne laser scanning, etc.).

After Bitmanagement filed a lawsuit in July 2016, the Navy uninstalled BS Contact Geo software from all its computers and "subsequently reinstalled the software on 34 machines," according to court documents.

"the government knows or should know that permission is required to copy Bitmanagement software to every device," Bitmanagement wrote in court documents. "however, the government did not obtain such a license." However, the United States Navy responded in a separate court document that its existing licenses allow them to make more copies of the software without additional payment.

The software company claims that each license is worth $1067.76, but David Kennedy, a Navy expert witness and a certified public accountant (CPA) at PricewaterhouseCoopers, has determined that the price for each license is $200. The Federal claims Court ruled that the accountant's conclusion was "fair and reasonable" and awarded Bitmanagement SoftwareGmbH $154400.

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