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Thomson Reuters Sues Over Open-Source Endnote-Alike Zotero

Posted by timothy on from the gmu-also-home-of-econtalk dept.

Noksagt writes "Thomson Reuters, the owner of the Endnote reference management software, has filed a $10 million lawsuit and a request for injunction against the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia's George Mason University develops Zotero, a free and open source plugin to Mozilla Firefox that researchers may use to manage citations. Thomson alleges that GMU's Center for History and New Media reverse engineered Endnote and that the beta version of Zotero can convert (in violation of the Endnote EULA) the proprietary style files that are used by Endnote to format citations into the open CSL file format."

3 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. "But it's just my opinion, I could be wrong" by Noksagt · · Score: 5, Informative

    I hoped that I kept the article summary relatively free of my personal opinion, which I will indulge in this comment:

    Thomson Reuters has too many asshats.

    Let us set aside the fact that academic software and those who develop academic software should embrace interoperability and knowledge sharing.

    I'll even set aside that, despite the (rewritten) title, Zotero has many fundamental differences from EndNote.

    The complaint is, in the words of Bruce D'Arcus, "a nuisance lawsuit designed to intimidate." Zotero's style repository contains no EndNote .ens styles and seems to contain no styles derived from those styles. CSL styles are created manually and through an online style creator. There is no way to get a new CSL style from an .ens file--the Zotero beta had mapped fields internally to allow .ens files to be used independently of CSL (but even this feature has been disabled in the trunk). Zotero thought about copyright issues surrounding this feature and came to the right decision--not to distribute .ens files or .csl files derived from .ens files, but to retain the feature to work with user-provided .ens files (similar to the way OpenOffice.org can open and save MS Office files).

    I have decided not to purchase EndNote and I am asking my employer to do the same, unless the suit is dropped. I intend to donate at least as much as an EndNote license costs to George Mason University, the Software Freedom Law Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or any other applicable entity that both defends Zotero in this case and solicits donations. (I don't know any organization who has stepped in on this case yet, but I imagine that one of these organizations can provide some sort of legal support in the future.)

    I encourage you to stop purchasing Thomson products too. There are plenty of reference managers for all platforms (some proprietary, some free/open source) that you can choose instead, not the least of which is Zotero.

    Disclaimer: I am a developer of refbase, a free and open source reference manager that might be seen to compete with Thomson Reuters's EndNoteWeb. I have and continue to use many reference managers. While I have many technical complaints about the EndNote products, they aren't the worst technical products. Thomson may be the worst socially, though--in addition to inane and baseless lawsuits, they are very slow to respond to general feedback.

    1. Re:"But it's just my opinion, I could be wrong" by mysidia · · Score: 5, Informative

      First off EULA's are not enforceable.

      Sorry; I wish this were true, but it's not. EULAs have been found firmly to be enforceable by the courts.

      But enforceability of the EULA is a question that may arise in this case. And the question of enforceability of EULA may depend on which court the case is heard it. No court has made a ruling that says EULAs are generally enforceable are not.

      Some courts have found that certain EULAs were enforceable in certain circumstances, others have found that certain EULAs were not enforceable, so there is still some hope that sanity may set in with the courts and the legislatures.

      Additionally the laws vary from state to state; some states have passed UCITA, and EULAs are more likely to be found enforceable there.

      EULAs are a matter of contract law which is a decision of the states; so it is very possible that such an agreement may be completely legal, valid and enforceable in some states, whereas other states specifically prohibit or do not give EULAs much weight in court (favoring protection of the general public's liberty instead of the corporation's privilege to restrict).

      See Blizzard vs BNETD

      At issue in this case was whether three software programmers who created the BnetD game server -- which interoperates with Blizzard video games online -- were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Blizzard Games' end user license agreement (EULA).

      The court issued summary judgement in Blizzard's favor, on the matter of the EULA, they found it enforceable, and that the authors of BNETD had violated it.

  2. Beware! Virginia is a UCITA state by grandpa-geek · · Score: 5, Informative

    Virginia was one of the two states that stupidly enacted the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA). Maryland was the other. Maryland made a few significant changes; Virginia changed very little.

    UCITA allows nasty provisions to be inserted in EULA's and is tilted to favor the large, downstream licensor (such as Reuters). IIRC, the version of UCITA enacted in Virginia doesn't even guarantee the licensee access to a copy of the license after the licensee clicks "I Accept" and allows EULA provisions under which the licensor can post revisions to the license on a web page at any time with the licensee being bound to the revised license without any other notice.

    With Virginia being a UCITA state, I wouldn't make any assumption about the strength of Reuters' case or what seems reasonable in a proper system of law. UCITA could let Reuters get away with things that would shock the conscience of anyone with a sense of fairness.