It seems that if your a govt then all that hot air about statutory damages and fighting copyright infringement go out with the trash...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131130/15092825408/us-hypocrisy-pushing-maximum-damages-infringement-while-settling-its-own-piracy-bill-less.shtmlYou may have seen the story over the weekend that the US government had settled a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against it by Apptricity for $50 million. Basically, the Army licensed Apptricity's server and device software for $4.5 million in 2004, but with a limited number of licenses -- which worked out to $1.35 million per server and $5,000 per device. The Army completely blew through the limit and installed it on another 100 servers and 9,000 devices (the government then tried to hide this from Apptricity). Apptricity noted that, at the existing deal's terms, the Army would have owed it an additional $225 million. The government, of course, settled for $50 million, leading some to note that it appears that by infringing, the government effectively got a 73% discount.
Hell, if we count each excess installation as a separation copyright violation (and, for what it's worth, there's a reasonable argument that under copyright law multiple installations of the same file only counts as a single violation, rather than multiple -- but the DOJ itself has argued that each copy should count as an individual infringement), and then multiply by the $150,000 that's the top of the line for statutory damages for willful infringement (which this appears to be), the government would have had to pay somewhere around $1.4 billion. And, again, the DOJ itself has regularly argued in court that $150,000 per infringement is perfectly reasonable.
I think techdirts summing up at the end of their article is the best epitaph for this one, hypocrisy.
