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Software Piracy is Theft, Plain and Simple…..Unless You Are From the Federal Government I Guess.

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Software Piracy is Theft, Plain and Simple…..Unless You Are From the Federal Government I Guess.

Then, guess what? Someone else pays your fine of $50 million. That would be us….the tax paying public who is working for a living.

According to a report from the site TorrentFreak.com:

“In 2004 Apptricity signed a contract with the U.S. Army to license enterprise software that manages troop and supply movements. The deal allowed the Government to use the software on five servers and 150 standalone devices, and since then it has been used in critical missions all over the world.”

The U.S. Army apparently has been used this “logistics and asset management software” in the Middle East and other operational areas and even used the software to coordinate emergency operations including the earthquake in Haiti.

The usage was accidentally discovered during Strategic Capabilities Planning in 2009 when the U.S. Army program director mentioned that 1000’s of devices used Apptricity Software.

“As it turned out, the army had installed pirated copies of the software on 93 servers and more than 9,000 standalone devices. With license fees of $1.35 million per server and $5,000 per device, Apptricity calculated that the Government owed the company $224 million in unpaid fees”

Apptricity filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims accusing the government of willful copyright infringements for an amount of $224,543,420.80 to cover the license shortfall. The transparent Obama administration agreed to pay $50 million. Of course, as already mentioned that money will simply be covered by the taxpaying public. So in reality, the penalty has been transferred to the public in the form of increased national debt and depreciated dollars.

Meanwhile, while this was transpiring, Joe Biden was spearheading the Joint Strategic Plan to combat intellectual property theft. His key catch phrase being, “Piracy is theft, clean and simple.” Or in his words:

“We used to have a problem in this town saying this. But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing (merchandise).”

Guess the press missed the second part murmured under his breath, “unless you’re the Federal government.” who like the Steven Segal film must think of themselves as “above the law.”

But let’s look on the bright side. The army saved us all (the public) nearly $175 million in licensing fees since after all we are ultimately responsible for the government’s debt. And who said, “Crime doesn’t pay.”

Maybe we should lobby to have Obama or Biden nominated for the Nobel Prize for Economics next. After all, that Obama Peace Prize sure worked out to be a good move didn’t it?