A German company accused the US Navy of large-scale piracy and won a lawsuit

The longstanding dispute, first initiated on July 16, 2016, claimed that Bitmanagement began working with the US Navy in 2011. The agreement provided for 38 copies of the software to be installed for testing by the military. They were very pleased, but then something went wrong.

What happened?

BS Contact Geo – a suite of programs for 3D visualization of geographic data (topographic survey, CAD, satellite imagery, aerial laser scanning, etc.). The Navy command highly appreciated the products of German developers, and therefore the latter hoped to receive a large order in 2013. The source wrote that negotiations and testing continued for 2 years, during which time Bitmanagement, at the request of the Navy, disabled the Flexwrap copy protection software, which monitors all copies of the BS Contact Geo program.

As the development company later found out, the Americans installed BS Contact Geo on at least 558,466 computers after paying only 38 licenses.

The government knew, or should have known, that copying Bitmanagement Software to every device on which Bitmanagement Software is installed requires a license,
– states a complaint.

While the developers’ first lawsuit was dismissed in 2019, a second followed two years later. This time court finds US Navy guilty of copyright infringement. The amount of the claim has been reduced several times: the Navy will pay the plaintiff only $154,400.