Oracle this month filed a lawsuit against Envisage Technologies, claiming the Bloomington, Indiana-based IT firm has been violating its copyrights by running Oracle Database on Amazon Web Services in an improper way.

The complaint [PDF], filed in a US federal district court in California, alleges Envisage has been operating its Acadis Readiness Suite – a collection of training and compliance software aimed at public-safety officials – in conjunction with a version of Oracle Database Standard Edition 1 (SE1) from 2006 hosted by Amazon in its cloud.

Envisage, Oracle claims, deploys its applications on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) without the appropriate license, serving more than 2m public safety professionals (police officers, firefighters, etc) and over 11,000 government agencies. That is to say, Envisage uses a version of Oracle Database hosted on Amazon RDS, and Oracle doesn’t believe this is correctly licensed.

“When an Amazon RDS customer uses Oracle Database for which it has a license purchased directly from Oracle, Amazon requires that RDS customer to have a supported license to at least Oracle Database SE2, regardless of the number of processors used by the customer,” the complaint says. “Further, for instances utilizing more than eight CPUs, Oracle’s licensing requires an Amazon RDS customer to have a license to Oracle Database EE.”

Envisage, it’s said, has only a license for Oracle Database SE1, which Oracle stopped selling in 2015. The company paid $8,500 for a perpetual license and support services as an initial pilot for one account.

Oracle says it approached Envisage in March after it became concerned that the firm was flouting its copyrights. Envisage initially agreed to discussions but subsequently refused to continue talking to Oracle, informing the database giant that “absent a lawsuit, it would not engage in discussion regarding its use of Oracle Database or its licenses to the software.”