Children's Hospital fights software company demanding payment for software the hospital hasn't used in a decade

Children's Hospital this week sued a Seattle-based software company to get it to back off from claims the hospital owes $925,000 for "terminal emulator" software the hospital last used in 2004.

In its lawsuit, filed in US District Court in Boston, the hospital tells Attachmate what it can do with its Reflection software, which the hospital stopped using when it abandoned the Digital VAX mini-computers that formed the heart of its e-mail and clinical-data systems until 2004 - and accuses the company of relying on overzealous compliance staffers who get paid "substantial bonuses" for charging companies for alleged unpaid use of Attachmate software.

"Reflection software has been useless to the Hospital for more than a decade," the hospital says:

In or around 2004, the Hospital began using newer, more modern servers, and its employees stopped using the Reflection terminal emulator to access the older server clusters. IT staff still occasionally accessed the older servers as needed, but, on information and belief, they did so only at the database level; they did not use the Reflection software.

In 2006, the Hospital took the older server clusters out of service altogether. Since the only function the Reflection software then performed at the Hospital was to access those servers, it is beyond dispute that the Hospital has not used the software at issue since 2006, nor could it.

The hospital says that in October, 2014, it agreed to run an Attachmate software audit across its network to see if there were any unauthorized copies of Reflection softwaare still running - and that it was shocked to get a demand for $925,000 for allegedly running software it hadn't paid for - a figure that includes 15 years of interest at 12% a year.

On information and belief, the Hospital obtained each version of the Reflection software found on its systems from WRQ, Attachmate, or its reseller in a legitimate commercial transaction in return for payment.

According to Attachmate, however, the Hospital did not purchase even one license for version 8 of Reflection for Multi-Host Enterprise Standard Edition, even though it allegedly had hundreds of copies of the program on its computers. Meanwhile, it had thousands of licenses for components of the Multi-Host suite, but no copies of that software anywhere on its computers. To any reasonable person acting in good faith, these facts would indicate that the hospital had, in fact, purchased licenses for all of the software it deployed.

But Attachmate's compliance personnel did not adopt or even suggest this commonsense conclusion.

Children's wants a judge to tell Attachmate to leave it alone, specifically, that it did nothing wrong and owes Attachmate nothing - and that even if it did, waiting 10 years to claim damages is just too long.

On information and belief, Attachmate’s current business model intentionally exploits its own failures of record-keeping and the routine destruction of historical business records by its current and former customers to extract exorbitant software licensing fees from those customers based on unsupported allegations of copyright infringement and breach of contract.

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