Zotero Lawsuit Dismissed 60
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."
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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.
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Maybe YOUR civilization did, but look at China, which is NOT a warm place. They've had a continuous civilization for several thousand years.
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Finally found a use for Wolfram Alpha:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Climate+of+Zhengzhou+china [wolframalpha.com]
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Climate+of+Yancheng+china [wolframalpha.com]
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Hurrah! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Hurrah! (Score:4, Informative)
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they're a large, public university with a 9 figure endowment.
Citation needed.
Re:Hurrah! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hurrah! (Score:4, Informative)
It's just sad. No one knows what a primary source is anymore.
Here is a good citation [gmu.edu].
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Endowment: $54,080,984
Pretty sure that's 8 figures...
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Actually, given the state of the economy, the large-endowment schools are hurting the most, because suddenly their primary source of income is in fact bleeding money.
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Re:Hurrah! (Score:5, Informative)
Also the AC above was right:
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/items/3749 [rankingsandreviews.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mason_University [wikipedia.org]
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 [gmu.edu]
This article also puts the endowment as just reaching 50 million a few years ago.
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TR shot themselfs in the foot with this lawsuit (Score:5, Interesting)
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;)
Re:TR shot themselfs in the foot with this lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
George Mason University said in November it had not renewed a site license for EndNote
This is what happens when you fsck a client.
Re:TR shot themselfs in the foot with this lawsuit (Score:4, Funny)
but at least they won't have any corrupt superblocks.
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Unless they were blocks that were exiled from Krypton to the Phantom Zone.
Re:TR shot themselfs in the foot with this lawsuit (Score:4, 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)
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Sharing ENS Styles (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of. Their terms of use state: [endnote.com]
(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.
They tried to STOP the very people they ... (Score:2)
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.
Hmm (Score:1, Troll)
Requires: Firefox 3.0.0 or later
Disabled: This extension does not work with Firefox 3.0.10
Zotero extension dismissed.
Works fine for me (Score:2, Informative)
I'm running Zotero 2.0b5 in Firefox 3.0.10 right now. What problems are you having?
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Both Zotero 1.0.10 and 2.0b5 have install.rdf manifests declaring compatibility up to Firefox 3.5. If you're getting that message, there's a problem with your Firefox profile.
Victory (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Now that's funny.
is it me (Score:2)
or is zotero VERY buggy? and crashes :(
yah yah i know, open source, fix it yourself :|
Why was the suit even brought? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Thomson Reuters is not just this guy (Score:1, Informative)
Thomson Reuters [wikipedia.org] is multi-million dollar company.
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NO!! Reuters is a guy! He looks just like Edward G. Robinson! I saw him on TV the other day.
Dismissed on what grounds? (Score:2)
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.
Zotero Donations (Score:4, Insightful)
Trevor's blog also had this post:
http://www.zotero.org/blog/help-zotero-by-donating-to-the-center-for-history-and-new-media/ [zotero.org]
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.
With or without prejudice? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The ironic thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I hadn't heard of Zotero either, but I know a few people whose lives it will make just a little bit easier :D I, too, thank the lawsuit.
Die Endnote Die (Score:2)
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.