14 DAY TRIAL // The US government has agreed to pay $50 million (€36.75 million) to settle a piracy dispute after using unpaid licenses.
Considering the fact that the US government has a rather strong stance towards copyright infringement, mostly due to the lobbying Hollywood studios have been doing, it’s rather ironic that they’ll be paying a settlement for using unpaid licenses, TorrentFreak reprots.
Alas, that’s the plan after the military was accused of copyright infringement. The developer of the pirated copies of logistics software was actually hoping to get a quarter of a billion dollars, which means the settlement is nowhere near in value.
“The Army has used Apptricity’s integrated transportation logistics and asset management software across the Middle East and other theaters of operation. The Army has also used the software to coordinate emergency management initiatives, including efforts following the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti,” the company said.
As any other company, Apptricity was rather happy to nab a government contract, but that joy soon turned sour.
The army had apparently installed pirated copies of the software on 93 servers and some 9,000 standalone device. Given the $1.35 million (€1 million) license fee per server and the $5,000 (€3,675) per device, the tab was calculated at over $220 million (€161 million).
Regardless of how much they hoped to get, Apptricity now announced that it has agreed to a $50 million (€36.74) settlement. “The figure represents a fraction of the software’s negotiated contract value that provides a material quantity of server and device licenses for ongoing and future Department of Defense usage,” the company said.
Apptricity is apparently going to continue collaborating with the government, despite the incident. Hopefully, this time they’ll get the money they’re due and the US army doesn’t plan to dodge the bill again, as they’ve obviously done in the not-so-distant past.