Anyone who has spent any time near the information desk in an academic library has heard about the EndNote software. Those of us who have been looking for alternatives generally choose the Zotero Firefox plugin for a whole range of different reasons.
Whilst reading my RSS feeds this morning I came across a post entitled “Thomson Reuters Takes Virginia to Court over Zotero” on the OStatic blog.
The post briefly outlines court action that has been brought against the makers of Zotero by Thomson Reuters due to some new functionality in the latest Zotero beta.
From the post:
George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media distributes Zotero, an open source Firefox extension that helps users collect and manage citations found on the web. It performs a similar function as Thomson Reuter’s EndNote software. The lawsuit is based on the premise that Zotero’s newest beta is able to convert the proprietary EndNote format to the open CSL (Citation Style Language) format.
The post concludes that the case would appear to be weak, see the full post, and I would have to agree that it feels frivolous as well.
I can’t help but wonder what, if any, damage this will do to the Zotero image. Particularly in the typically risk averse senior management levels of academic libraries. My instinct tells me though that Thomson Reuters is about to find out what it is like to take on a community of passionate users.
What are you thoughts about the case?
Feed
September 30, 2008 at 13:33
I can’t help but think that if OpenOffice has been getting away with converting Microsoft’s .doc extensions into .sxw as long as it has been, Zotero is safe – if Microsoft can’t bust free software for the same thing, I just can’t see Reuter having sufficient legal oomph to actually challenge Zotero.
Makes me wonder though – If the information in an endnote file can be read as text, and then the context re-established to make it back into an Endnote-style format, isn’t that what the semantic web is all about? Maintaining context across platforms? I will admit my understanding of both law and the semantic web is minimal though, and stop blathering there.
October 2, 2008 at 08:35
It will be interesting to watch and see how this all works out.