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."

Re:TR shot themselfs in the foot with this lawsuit

[qortra]

Absolutely, and just like the RIAA, they are now out not only the lawyer costs and the goodwill of the public, but also a customer. From the Chronicle article:

George Mason University said in November it had not renewed a site license for EndNote

This is what happens when you fsck a client.

Sharing ENS Styles

[Noksagt]

Now it seems they have corrected the license statement to allow such sharing.

Kind of. Their terms of use state: [endnote.com]

EndNote includes customization options that licensed individual and institutional customers can use to create new and modify existing EndNote style (.ens), filter (.enf), and connection (.enz) files for their personal use and to share with other licensed EndNote users for use only in conjunction with EndNote.

(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.

Victory

[DaMattster]

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.

Why was the suit even brought?

[bzipitidoo]

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?

Zotero Donations

[Noksagt]

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?

[John Hasler]

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.

Re:Hurrah!

[iluvcapra]

The precedent would have been sufficient to cripple any number of open source developers...

The ironic thing

[femtoguy]

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.