While they fight against pirates in open water, the US Navy are being accused of pirating on dry land.

German software developer Bitmanagement Software is suing the US Navy for copyright infringement damages of over €540 million after they said the navy stole hundreds of thousands of copies of their software.

Bitmanagement makes a virtual reality program called BS Contact Geo that can visualise locations and scenarios such as military training in a VR simulation.

The original agreement between the navy and Bitmanagement was to install the software on 38 computers, and due to the amount of licences required and other technical reasons, Bitmanagement removed any parts of the software that tracked its licensing. This allowed the navy to just copy the software from one computer to another, eventually installing it on 558,466 computers.

The navy was in negotiations with Bitmanagement at the time to greatly expand their agreement over licenses, but decided to proceed with copying the software while these talks were still going on.

While Bitmanagement is looking for over €540 million from the navy for pirating their software, the final cost owed could be substantially larger, as much as $150,000 per license. With it installed on over 550,000 computers, the navy could be paying over a huge amount of money.