The U.S. Navy was discovered responsible of piracy and is ordered to pay a software program firm $154,400 for a lawsuit filed again in 2016. The firm, Bitmanagement Software GmbH, filed a criticism in opposition to the Navy, accusing the navy department of copyright infringement.

GmbH claimed that they had issued 38 copies of their 3D digital actuality software program, BS Contact Geo, however whereas they have been nonetheless in negotiations for added licenses, the Navy put in the software program onto at the least 558,466 machines between 2013 and 2015.

In the court filing, GmbH claimed, “Without Bitmanagement’s advance knowledge or consent, the Navy installed BS Contact Go onto hundreds of thousands of computers. Bitmanagement did not license or otherwise authorize these uses of its software, and the Navy has never compensated Bitmanagement for these uses of Bitmanagement’s software.”

The firm sued the Navy for practically $600 million for “willful copyright infringement” of the software program which, in accordance with the seller’s website, is a 3D viewer that “enables you to visualize and interact with state of the art 2D/3D content,” and is predicated on digital information captured from “various sources (land surveys, CAD, satellite imagery, airborne laser scanning, etc).”

The courtroom filings acknowledged that after GmbH filed the lawsuit in July 2016, the Navy uninstalled the BS Contact Geo software program from all of its computer systems and “subsequently reinstalled the software on 34 seats, for inventory purposes.”

GmbH wrote within the courtroom submitting, “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 government nonetheless failed to obtain such licenses.”

However, the Navy responded in a separate court filing, claiming that the present licenses it obtained allowed them to make extra copies of the software program with out requiring extra cost.

“Defendant denies that the licenses were limited to installation of BS Contact Geo on a total of 38 Navy personal computers,” the submitting argued. “Defendant further avers that the Navy procured concurrent-use network-installation licenses of BS Contact Geo.”

The software program firm claimed the per-copy license was value $1,067.76, however the Navy’s knowledgeable witness, David Kennedy, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) for Pricewaterhouse Coopers decided that the value per license quantities to $200.

Kennedy’s testimony was discovered to be dependable, the courtroom submitting says, including “Kennedy testified he looked ‘at the Navy’s side of the equation, and what they had agreed to previously, and what their use ultimately was of the software, and the limited amount of use.’”

The Court of Federal Claims decided that Kennedy’s conclusion was discovered “to be fair and reasonable,” and awarded GmbH $154,400.