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

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

[Unending]

Thank you for doing your commenting this way, I hope that more story submitters will try to do the same thing in the future.

Same old story

[benntop]

EndNote does one thing [citation management] well. The problem is that citation management isn't a difficult thing to accomplish in software. You get some information in one format, store it however you want, and then spit it out according to another format when you are done.

I am sure that EndNote is a cash cow for Thompson, but the gravy train can't last forever. Other free (Zotero) and non-free (Papers) alternatives are becoming increasingly available - and they are far better than EndNote. Suing the competition won't make that problem go away.

Re:Looks like a pretty weak case

[John Hasler]

It should also be noted that as Reuters is claiming only breach of contract this suit will not prevent anyone not affiliated with the defendants from distributing and/or using the software. The project can continue if anyone is interested in continuing it even if GMU loses or gives up. I hope lots of people have downloaded the source.

As the head instructional tech guy at my college

[edremy]

I guess I'll start strongly discouraging Endnote usage by all my faculty. The library already makes Refworks available and I've been using Zotero for my class this fall and love it. Endnote is expensive and since we have a pile of individual copies of varying vintage purchased through the years it's annoying to deal with anyway.

Time to talk to the reference librarians again about scheduling some more faculty training with them...

I'd never heard of Zotero before..

[thephydes]

probably the same as many other users. Nothing like some free advertising. I've downloaded it and will probably start using it. And yes I usually use endnote.

GMU Library provides both

[dtaciuch]

I teach at GMU (English); the library here has links to both Zotero and Endnote (with a site license for the latter. I wonder how much that cost?).

I plan to ask the library to drop the license for Endnote; why pay them to sue us?

I encourage my research writing classes to use Zotero anyway.

Re:GMU Library provides both

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously as I work within GMU (and don't have job protections that parent probably has).

If software is managed campus-wide, then there's no need to bother the library. As far as I've heard (e-mail on the 25th), the entire university is dropping the EndNote site license as of Nov. 16. (Obviously, the injunction could have an impact on that.)

We've been warned that EndNote is so tightly integrated with Microsoft Word and the rest of our base PC software load that there may be undesirable side effects when the license expires on November 16 -- it's too late to redo the image, so EndNote will have to stay installed but nonfunctional until the Spring image is pushed in January. I've only had a handful of students ask about using EndNote (to be fair to Zotero, I didn't even know about the software until we got notice that it would replace EndNote) and I've never come across a faculty member using it as part of a class.

I was surprised by the announcement of the switch, since Zotero is FOSS. Quite frankly, the university spends money where it doesn't need to, and cuts corners where it shouldn't, which usually results in backpedaling, costing students and taxpayers. But maybe someone at GMU has figured out that trading expensive site-licensed software for comparable free software is a better alternative than cutting student services and operating hours in light of the recent statewide budget crunch.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible in the US to use an EULA to prevent third parties to read your proprietary formats?

Do you think the legislator should better enforce interoperability provisions?

First off EULA's are not enforceable.

Second even if they were their nature makes them useless in this case, even if the program had been reverse engineered to gain information from it the programmers doing said reverse engineering clearly are not the end user for the product, and since they can reverse engineer the program with out installing it its likely they never even saw the EULA, let alone actually agreed to it.

Thrid, and most importantly copyright law has specific exceptions for format shifting, and interoperability. Even if its massively abused to do so copyright was never intended to restrict a market.

So while I can think of laws that say this activity is allowed I can't think of any that would forbid it, I don't think their suit has a leg to stand on.

This case's only hope is the DMCA, its got some pretty ridiculous restrictions of what can be done to software, and while I don't think it applies here I am however not a lawyer.

Ok what the hell, is the captcha system context sensitive? my word was 'infringe'. Thats just spooky.

Can you say...

[Kalten]

...f***ing hypocrites?

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.

Thomson Reuters has a major division that develops tax and accounting software. The important thing to know about the tax and accounting software market is that it's saturated. Every accountant who wants software has it. If you want customers, you've got two choices: either get new accountants just coming into the market (which is balanced out by accountants retiring or otherwise leaving the market), or take them from your competitors.

And how do you take customers from your competitors, you ask?

First, by making better software. Second, by making sure that your prospective new customers don't have to re-enter every bit of information. You develop conversion software. Yes, that's right. You develop software--most likely in violation of the competitor's software's EULA--that extracts the data and digests it into a format that your software can handle.

And Thomson Reuters does this on a regular basis.

I used to work for them. I did exactly that for seven years. I think they may have just opened a can of worms that they really don't want to have open.

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

[Geste]

"There are plenty of reference managers for all platforms"

True. But I see lots of folks at my university who are addicted to EndNote's buggy "Cite While You Write" functions that provide MS-Word integration. RefWorks has an analogous "Write while you cite" function, but still lots of people have accumulated libraries in EndNote and still have a love/hate addiction to CWYW.

To make it worse, he negatives of this situation are not limited to EndNote but extend to Thomson-ISI's intent to maintain vertical lock-in. Our library provides ISI Web of Science on-line, but when you look at the licensing terms real hard it's abominable -- yes you can access these citations but don't think about really *using* them in any meaningful way (like citing them on your Web page). It's draconian.

So it feels like getting past EndNote to a more open alternative will require freeing up all elements of the stack to include citation repositories. I ask in earnest: is there an alternative vision for these? A combination of repositories, APIs and tools that would delivery a "free" citation/bib system from top to bottom?