German software company Bitmanagement Software GmbH has accused the United States Navy of illegal installing over 558,000 copies of its BS Contact Geo product, a virtual reality program used for visualizing real world geography in a virtual environment.

According to Bitmanagement, the company offered a small batch of software licenses to the Navy on a trial basis, but the Navy then copied that software on a large number of computers well beyond the scope of the original trial without paying for them.

Here is an excerpt from the lawsuit, which includes some odd self-promotion on Bitmanagement’s part when referring to the quality of the BS Contact Geo program:

“In 2011 and 2012, Bitmanagement agreed to license its software to the Navy on a limited and experimental basis. Those individual PC-based licenses authorized the Navy to install BS Contact GEO on a total of just 38 computers for the purposes of testing, trials runs, and integration into Navy systems. In order to facilitate such testing and integration of the software on Navy computers in preparation for the large scale licensing desired by the Navy, it was necessary for Bitmanagment to remove the control mechanism that tracked and limited use of the software.”

“Based on the quality and performance of BS Contact Geo—including the interactive functionality and high-quality graphics that make it particularly useful to large military organizations—the Navy determined that it would deploy the software on large scale, and began negotiations with Bitmanagement for the purchase of numerous additional licenses.”

“While those negotiations were ongoing, however, and without Bitmanagement’s advance knowledge or consent, the Navy installed BS Contact Geo software 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.”

Bitmanagement is seeking damages of over $596 million, which the company says is the market value of the unpaid software licenses. The Navy has yet to comment on the lawsuit.

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