Given the United States’ intolerance for copyright infringement and the pirates that propagate it, you’d think Uncle Sam would be a little more keen on making sure that his men were playing by the book themselves. As it turns out, a whole mess of computers running unlicensed, illegal copies of Windows 7 belong to none other than the US Army itself.
The situation was brought to light when a soldier stationed in a US Army base in Qatar sent Torrent Freak photographic proof of the Army’s apparently lax licensing policy. And this certainly wouldn’t be the first time the military found itself in the midst of copyright drama; just a few weeks ago, the US had to pay $US50 million in a settlement for its use of pirated military logistics software. The situation in this case is, admittedly, not quite as severe, with just 18 computers at the soldier’s education center running the illegal software.
That doesn’t necessarily mean this is an isolated incident, though. Even after the soldier told his direct superiors, nothing seems to have changed. [Torrent Freak]