14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is going to war against what it described as a software pirate after the company was accused of extortion when it tried to resolve the issue amicably.
Hanna Instruments, a Rhode Island-based company selling analytical solutions, is being accused of using unlicensed keys for Microsoft products, including the Microsoft Office productivity suite.
The software giant reached out to them last year, asking for a little over $72,000 in damages. Otherwise, going to court would have produced damages up to nearly $5 million, Microsoft warned at that time.
But Hanna wasn’t impressed, and instead of paying Microsoft the money, it accused the software giant of extortion, as it believed the accusations were without merit.
“BSA, Microsoft, and their counsel have, without supplying one scintilla of evidence, issued a series of letters for the sole purpose of extorting inflated monetary damages,” the company told the court according to a report from TorrentFreak.
Microsoft ready for legal dispute
Microsoft and its ally BSA Software Alliance decided to move the dispute to court and not only to prove the all the accusations are actually based on evidence that Hanna used unlicensed Microsoft software, but also to ask for damages that are likely to exceed the $72,000 they were previously seeking.
“Hanna has engaged and continues to engage in the unauthorized installation, reproduction, and distribution and other unlawful use of Microsoft Software on computers on its premises and has used unlicensed copies of Microsoft Software to conduct its business,” the allies explained in court documents, according to the same source.
Microsoft says its discovered two different product keys that were used by Hanna and which were actually included in a larger batch of licenses supposed to be used for education in China. Instead, they somehow ended up being activated on Hanna’s systems in the United States.
Furthermore, the software giant says, the Rhode Island-based firm used a license for its products purchased from an illegal store online, which in the meantime was shut down by Microsoft itself.
It remains to be seen if Hanna now agrees with Microsoft’s settlement offer given that there’s evidence confirming the use of counterfeit software, but on the other hand, the Redmond-based company might no longer agree with such a proposal following the extortion claims.