Here’s a story that will raise eyebrows among academic readers: Courtesy of Crooked Timber1 comes news from late last month that Thomson Reuters has filed suit against the Commonwealth of Virginia,2 seeking an injunction against George Mason University to prevent the school from distributing Zotero, a Firefox plugin for managing references and citations. The lawsuit claims that Zotero violates the license agreement for EndNote, Thomson Reuters’s citations management software, because Zotero converts the proprietary .ens style file made by EndNote. In essence, argues Thomson Reuters, a GMU professor reverse-engineered their commercial application and the school is now giving it away for free.
Frankly, not the sexiest intellectual property case that has ever been seen before the courts. But it has implications for millions of researchers, scholarly writers, students, and librarians.3 And though you would want to ask this site’s technology director or sundry lawyers for more considered reactions, Reuters’s case doesn’t seem to hold a lot of weight. Disruptive Librarian Technology Jester4 points out that Zotero does not convert EndNote files, but is designed to read/play nicely with those EndNote files that Zotero users have already paid for. He notes, too, that EndNote put output styles that were previously freely available online behind a click-through license, a move DLTJ calls “a little like closing the barn door after the horse has gone.”
Crooked Timber’s Farrell, though not a lawyer, observes that there’s “no significant innovation or value-added” to EndNote’s proprietary file style. If his reaction is any indication, it may be a mistake for the makers of citations-management software to go suing the universities who buy the stuff.
Photo by karindalziel
1Farrell, Henry. “GMU sued for Zotero.” Crooked Timber. 30 September 2008: <http://crookedtimber.org/2008/09/30/gmu-sued-for-zotero/>.
2Eds. “Reuters Says George Mason University Is Handing Out Its Proprietary Software.” Courthouse News Service. 17 September 2008: <http://www.courthousenews.com/2008/09/17/Reuters_Says_George_Mason_University_Is_Handing_Out_Its_Proprietary_Software.htm>.
3 Thomson ResearchSoft. “EndNote Information.” http://www.endnote.com/eninfo.asp
4Murray, Peter E. “Updates on the EndNote/Zotero Lawsuit.” Disruptive Librarian Technology Jester. 6 October 2008: <http://dltj.org/article/endnote-zotero-lawsuit-2/>.
