Thomson Reuters Sues Over Open-Source Endnote-Alike Zotero

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."

Comments

Looks like a pretty weak case

[One Louder]

Having read the complaint, it doesn't look like Thomson has much in the way of a case - this probably won't get very far.

They're basically relying on license language that prohibits the reverse-engineering of the program itself - but there's nothing there that prohibits reverse engineering of the file format that it uses.

Re:Looks like a pretty weak case

[dgatwood]

More to the point, any file created by a user is inherently the sole property of the user. The only way contract terms prohibiting reverse engineering of file formats would hold up would be if the terms explicitly prohibited giving the file to anyone who is not bound by the contract.

In the absence of such a clause, as soon as that file leaves your hands into the hands of someone who did not agree to the contract terms, any rights the company has to protect their file format cease to be relevant or enforceable (with the exception of patents).

In the presence of such a clause, you're going to have a hard time selling your application to anyone with half a brain, and such a clause would almost certainly be thrown out as unconscionable because of the unreasonable burden it would place on the user to verify the license of someone else before giving that person data that the user legitimately created and on which the user holds exclusive copyright.

Either way, file formats effectively cannot be protected from reverse engineering. As such, this company would have to somehow prove that it was impossible to reverse engineer the file format without reverse engineering the app itself. Speaking as somebody who has reverse engineered file formats before, I can say that any such statement could not possibly be made by an intelligent person without it being perjury....

So there you go. This suit is frivolous, and I hope the company has to pay a few million in restitution for pain and suffering to the victims of the suit. Such IP fraud deserves nothing less than a huge in-court bitch slap. This is precisely the sort of case that makes me opposed to every aspect of the Pro-IP act.... Yet another case of copyright abuse by a corporation to harm consumers and illegally stifle competition from smaller players.... *sigh*

Re:"But it's just my opinion, I could be wrong"

[InspectorxGadget]

Reverse engineering may be prohibited by a license agreement even though it is not protected by the protection generally afforded to trade secrets in the US, where reverse engineering is usually permissible. With that said, though, an interesting but minor issue that popped up in one of the DVD Copy Control Association, Inc. v. Bunner cases is the burden of proof that reverse engineering has actually been carried out by the defendant. In that case, the DVDCCA not only couldn't prove that Bunner (an online distributor of DVDJon's DVDDeCSS) had reverse engineered the software - required to prove the violation of the particular software's EULA - but also couldn't definitively establish that reverse engineering had even occurred. So even if someone reverse engineered Endnote - a fact that can probably be proven by analyzing the source code of Zotero's format convertor - Thomson-Reuters will still have to prove that a Zotero author or distributor subject to the EULA did so.

If you haven't already . . .

[base3]

. . . remove the "[zotero.org]" /. inserts first:

svn co https://www.zotero.org/svn/extension/branches/1.0/ zotero

Never know what idiotic (or corrupt) judge might grant a preliminary injunction forcing them to remove the source.

Re:"But it's just my opinion, I could be wrong"

[moosesocks]

Of course, the developer of a reference manager would be the type to take the time to adequately explain his argument, and fully annotate his sources :-)

Zotero is a brilliant piece of work

[yes it is]

Zotero is the best piece of software I've come across in a long time, and the database schema is particularly nice. I always thought that Thomposon were fools. Now on one side they're having their lunch eaten by google scholar, and on the other side by a variety of free and/or open source bibliographic managers. For any Thomposon execs reading - if you don't stop regarding the users data as your property and start opening up instead, your decline will be much faster than similar proprietary software companies.

Re:"But it's just my opinion, I could be wrong"

[DigitAl56K]

It would be easier for more story submitters to do the same thing in future if comments carried over from submissions to stories, and if you had a reasonable chance to review what the Slashdot editors did to your summary before it went live, or if you even knew in how many hours it might actually go live once it's modded up into a story.