Government Pays $50M For Pirating Military Software

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Attention citizens! Remember to always do as I say, not as I do. Thanks!

- Uncle Sam

For years the U.S. military operated pirated copies of logistics software that was used to protect soldiers and shipments in critical missions. Apptricity, the makers of the software, accused the military of willful copyright infringement and sued the Government for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in unpaid licenses. In a settlement just announced, the Obama administration has agreed to pay $50 million to settle the dispute.
 
So...

Government - who needs more licenses? Just install it on as many machines as you need.

Apptricity - Hey, Uncle Sam, you owe us 250,000,000.

Government - we will pay you 50,000,000 - take it or leave it.

Anybody see the stupidity here?

Can I get a 80% discount on all my software if I pirate it first?
 
When you only have one customer, don't be surprised when that customer realizes that they can name their own price.
 
I'm surprised this software didn't have some sort of activation scheme on it. I can see how easy it would have been to just keep installing copies of this without knowing the limitations of the agreed upon licenses.
 
Should have had a RIAA/MPAA type settlement. One hundred trillion dollars!
 
Wait wait wait wait wait.....

Let me get this straight.

So the Government willingly payed a corporation a fine for pirated software, without so much as a shrug of the shoulder? But... when companies steal each others GUI's, they're called Microsoft and Apple and that's perfectly fine for a judge
 
I was pissed I sold off 7 BTC a few months ago...

odds of the drive being usable (even under lab recovery conditions?) it's been out in the weather, wet, cold, garbage water, and perhaps tons of pressure on top of it...

what sucks is those BTC are quite literally lost forever.
 
I was pissed I sold off 7 BTC a few months ago...

odds of the drive being usable (even under lab recovery conditions?) it's been out in the weather, wet, cold, garbage water, and perhaps tons of pressure on top of it...

what sucks is those BTC are quite literally lost forever.
I think we both did the same thing; opened up multiple news threads and didn't keep track of which one we were in--I presume you meant to post here: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1040419325#post1040419325 :)
 
I was pissed I sold off 7 BTC a few months ago...

odds of the drive being usable (even under lab recovery conditions?) it's been out in the weather, wet, cold, garbage water, and perhaps tons of pressure on top of it...

what sucks is those BTC are quite literally lost forever.

Think you're in wrong thread haha...


This should be no shocker. Things in the military are just as unorganized as the rest of the political system.

My question is, how were they actually caught and why did it take so long.
 
My question is, how were they actually caught and why did it take so long.

"This unauthorized use was discovered by accident during Strategic Capabilities Planning 2009, when the U.S. Army Program Director stated that thousands of devices used Apptricity software."

Because of their own dumb big mouths!
 
So the government can pirate software and not go to jail, but if the people pirate they go to jail.

crazy
 
"This unauthorized use was discovered by accident during Strategic Capabilities Planning 2009, when the U.S. Army Program Director stated that thousands of devices used Apptricity software."

Because of their own dumb big mouths!

That makes it sound as if they found the problem and essentially narc'd themselves out though which I find hard to believe. Or maybe they realized what had been done and moved to fix it, accepting the "punishment" for what had happened.
 
That makes it sound as if they found the problem and essentially narc'd themselves out though which I find hard to believe. Or maybe they realized what had been done and moved to fix it, accepting the "punishment" for what had happened.
Oh, no, I inferred it to mean that the military was bragging about how many thousands of their computers were running this very specialized application that makes them smarter killers, and the publisher of the software caught wind of the sound bite and investigated knowing that they had only sold a small fraction of the number of licenses that so-and-so quoted. I think it was just a moronic moment. :)
 
That's got to be the highest per license cost I've ever heard of.

$5,000 per device isn't unheard of on tier 2 or tier 3 enterprise logistics software. It is actually surprisingly low considering tier 1 global supply chain software like Manhattan and SAP usually comes at a base of $500,000 per server.
 
So...

Government - who needs more licenses? Just install it on as many machines as you need.

Apptricity - Hey, Uncle Sam, you owe us 250,000,000.

Government - we will pay you 50,000,000 - take it or leave it.

Anybody see the stupidity here?

Can I get a 80% discount on all my software if I pirate it first?

Well if you pirate everything, then only pay for things that you think are worth it... yeah I think you probably could get into that 80% range :)
 
$5,000 per device isn't unheard of on tier 2 or tier 3 enterprise logistics software. It is actually surprisingly low considering tier 1 global supply chain software like Manhattan and SAP usually comes at a base of $500,000 per server.

So they're charging them more than double per server (5 times more if you factor in the per device costs) what the top market solution costs? How is that surprisingly low?
 
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