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Zotero Lawsuit Dismissed
peretzpup writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Thomson Reuters's lawsuit against George Mason University has been dismissed. Last fall the news organization had sued GMU's Center for History and New Media over supposed violations of the EndNote licensing agreement by the Zotero project, hosted at the university. Zotero, a Firefox plug-in designed to help scholars store and organize their online research, has seen millions of downloads. Zotero project co-director Sean Takats's announcement is pretty heartwarming. No comment as yet from Thomson Reuters."
And rightly so. I doubt they actually made any money from the plug in, so $10m would have utterly crippled both the university and the students therein.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
To make their court case stronger they put legal language on their website that prohibited sharing of style files and reference libraries. This naturally raised questions from the endnote users, because sharing these files is essential part of using the product. The support staff on their user forums was put in an awkward position of explaining that that files can in fact be shared, while the language on their own web site was stating the opposite. Now it seems they have corrected the license statement to allow such sharing.
Nice PR, TR;)
Requires: Firefox 3.0.0 or later
Disabled: This extension does not work with Firefox 3.0.10
Zotero extension dismissed.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Kind of. Their terms of use state:
(emphasis mine). In other words, they claim that you can't use the files that you create using their software in third-party software, such as Zotero. This would be like saying you can't open an MS Word Document in OpenOffice.org Writer.
I'm running Zotero 2.0b5 in Firefox 3.0.10 right now. What problems are you having?
This is the sweet taste of victory for an excellent project. Thomson Education is notorious for charging exhorbitant amounts of money to students for textbooks. Their testing division is a borderline racket for the amount they charge for testing on testing software that still runs on Windows 2000 Professional and crashes mid way through the MC$E tests. I even was told that I couldn't get a refund or a makeup date because I was expected to be at a test center in the middle of snow storm in Pennsylvania. Never mind that two feet of snow fell. Any time Thomson Reuters gets its butt handed to it, I cheer.
Storing food is no great feat.
What really facilitates technological advancement is agriculture, and for agriculture you need to look to warmth. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and the like are not known for their harsh winters yet where did our civilization come from?
For thousands of years civilization is what happened in the hot places of the world. Babylon, Israel, the Assyrian Empire, the Persian Empire, Uruk, the list goes on.
or is zotero VERY buggy? and crashes :(
yah yah i know, open source, fix it yourself :|
Maybe YOUR civilization did, but look at China, which is NOT a warm place. They've had a continuous civilization for several thousand years.
I use it daily & it has never crashed. Firefox occasionally crashes (but that has usually been due to the flash plugin). Have you posted anything at the Zotero forums about your issue? They do have a good error reporting tool too.
Guess they were upset when George Mason beat UCONN.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_NCAA_Men%27s_Division_I_Basketball_Tournament#East_Regional
Good that GMU won. Even better that the case was tossed. Yet celebrating this feels like celebrating that the bar was lowered an inch after it had crept up 10 inches.
What gave Reuters the idea he had a case? Is he just another greedy control freak who knew very well he didn't really have a case but thought he could game the system to give him far too much? Our laws are so bad he really thought he had a chance? And did he think users would meekly submit to his control if his lawsuit succeeded? I expect he didn't think that far ahead. Or maybe the whole thing was a bluff and he hoped GMU would roll over without a fight? Or did he really believe he was in the right?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
First of all, China has a variety of climates. The cradles of their civilization, places like Zhengzhou and Yangcheng, seem to have moderate climates (I can't easily find historical data, so the links are not as conclusive as they could be). They aren't warm places, but they certainly aren't cold either.
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
Thomson Reuters is multi-million dollar company.
Does anyone have a link to the actual decision or know on what ground the case was dismissed?
Depending on the details this case could be a indicator of some sanity returning to copyright law or just a case that was won on ancillary technicalities.
should have been encouraging.
TR were stupidly engaging in trying to shut people down, instead of using an open source license solution to grow and extend their product AT NO COST TO THEMSELVES.
The use of lawyers who are creatures who can act like O'Brien in 1984, instead of the use of innovation to add value, is entirely consistent with people who believe that authority comes from the power they can bring to bear instead of the authorship of the idea.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and the like are not known for their harsh winters yet where did our civilization come from?
On the other hand, what they are known for these days is their complete collapse of civilization.
Trevor's blog also had this post:
http://www.zotero.org/blog/help-zotero-by-donating-to-the-center-for-history-and-new-media/
which says that all tax-deductible donations made in June will be matched twice-over. This seems like a good opportunity to congratulate the team for making it through their legal hurdles & to support the development of great free/open source software.
Was the suit dismissed with prejudice or without? The difference is important. "With prejudice" means that the issue is settled and they can never bring it before any US court again. "Without prejudice" means that they can try again.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
This was a dispute over a contract, not about IP (copyright/patent/trademark). It'd only be precedent to open source developers who signed ridiculous contracts.
The really ironic thing is that if it hadn't been for the law suit, I would not have found Zotero. I have been complaining for years about Endnote, but was unwilling to go LaTeX/BibTeX all of the way, and had been paying for endnote, and using Microsoft Word. With Zotero, I got completely changed over to OpenOffice on all platforms.
So, Thanks for the law suit.
And I don't mean The Endnote The....
Endnote is a horrible program. Unintuitive, no error messages when you do something wrong.
It is just painful to use. Zotero isn't perfect but it is so much better than Endnote.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
"Zotero for world Peace." [Citation Needed]
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Finally found a use for Wolfram Alpha:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Climate+of+Zhengzhou+china
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Climate+of+Yancheng+china
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button