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Zotero Lawsuit Dismissed

Posted by kdawson on from the ending-of-note dept.

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."

2 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. TR shot themselfs in the foot with this lawsuit by pesho · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Taking page of RIAA playbook TR sued their own clients - academics using EndNote. The silly part is that many of the citation style files the lawsuit was about are actually created by Endnote users.

    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;)

    1. Re:TR shot themselfs in the foot with this lawsuit by guisar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My brother is a digital media specialist (aka Librarian 2.0) for a major university and believe me Endnote has not just lost one client. Everyone on the inside is wicked pissed about their lawsuit, their outrageous fees and shitty service. They should not be surprised when Universities abandon them in droves just to avoid becoming the next target of this shitty company. Let's hope Blackboard is the next casualty since they suck even harder. (aka almost as much and in the same "make a simple task slow and complicated" way as this comment system on Slashdot)