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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."

3 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;)

  2. Re:Hurrah! by JoeRandomHacker · · Score: 5, Funny

    There is something ironic about citing Wikipedia in response to a [citation needed].

  3. Re:Hurrah! by FlyingBishop · · Score: 5, Informative

    Also the AC above was right:

    http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/items/3749

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mason_University

    GMU's endowment is only $54,955,028. Wikipedia had an extra 1 on the front for some reason (I fixed it.)

    At the same time, I got the corrected figure from the reference cited on Wikipedia, so it doesn't really discredit wikipedia, so much as prove you need to follow your sources, whatever you're reading.

    http://eagle.gmu.edu/gazette/articles/9750
    This article also puts the endowment as just reaching 50 million a few years ago.