The $10 million question…
So, after I’d left for the weekend something started making its way around the blogosphere. Richard blogged about it over on Panlibus and an assortment of blogs I follow were getting riled over the weekend.
What is it? Thomson Reuters is suing George Mason University in an attempt to prevent distribution of the new version of Zotero.
This should be interesting.
The crucks of the complaint, judging by the quote on Court House News, is
“A significant and highly touted feature of the new beta version of Zotero, however, is its ability to convert - in direct violation of the License Agreement - Thomson’s 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files.”
At first glance it seems the case would be specious. Reverse engineering file formats in order to allow interoperability has been settled on several occassions.
In 1992, in Sega vs Accolade, Accolade succeeded with their defence that reverse-engineering for the purposes of creating an interoperable product was a fair-use. In this case Accolade had no commercial relationship with Sega - no signed contracts or license agreements.
In this case, however, GMU have a site license for EndNote. In Bower vs Baystate the courts upheld an anti reverse-engineering clause in the case where it had been knowingly and voluntarily entered into. This raises the question of how much an institution’s license agreement can be used to bind the faculty members of that institution.
If the .ens file format contained the users’ references then that interoperability would be a fairly clear thing. But this isn’t about importing an EndNote library, it’s about importing the citation style files, they contain information about citation styles that I suspect has taken substantial intellectual effort to create. They’re shipped as part of the product.
Thomson Reuters state that
“EndNote output styles are provided solely for use by licensed owners of EndNote and with the EndNote product.”
Now, if all of the styles were created by Thomson Reuters and shipped with EndNote I’d probably agree that Zotero is being unfair. But EndNote allows you to create and edit the styles. This puts at least a portion of ens files in the user-generated category and into play for Zotero to integrate with.
It seems to me that the contract violation case doesn’t stand up for all of these reasons, but IANAL. A Copyright infringement case against anyone converting and distributing styles that Thomson Reuters created would seem a better bet, but as the RIAA found out with its battles against music sharing, that’s not an easy road to go down.
The case itself seems to have some technical problems in its filing also. James Grimmelmann, Associate Professor at New York Law School, describes the faults in his piece: Thomson Reuters: The Gang That Couldn’t Sue Straight
Would a case like this affect your institutions use of Zotero or EndNote? How do you think George Mason University and Thomson Reuters should resolve this?
September 29th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
[...] My colleague Rob Styles, who has a far better understanding of these things, has published an excellent post over on our sister connecting knowledge blog, Xiphos, reviewing some of the legal [...]
September 30th, 2008 at 1:38 am
Note that third parties do not carry this claim, Thomson’s FTP site distributes files that do not carry this claim, and even Thomson’s website lacked this claim earlier this year.
Institutions are slow moving. I can tell you that it has stopped me from buying an individual license to EndNote & I’ve sent news of the case to the library’s that I’m a member of who have a limited number of EndNote seats. They probably won’t like it (but pressure from the large staff will probably mean that the site license will be continued in some form).
This is not great press for Thomson among the core customers of their EndNote line (librarians, lawyers, academics, etc.).
GMU is acting appropriately. They should have stood their ground back when Thomson asked them to discontinue the use of their “EndNote” trademark to describe the file format whose common mimetype is “application/x-endnote-refer!”
Thomson Reuters is doing what I (sadly) expect them to do.
What they should do is learn how to leverage open source technologies more. They could make EndNoteWeb and their ISI web applications work better with Zotero than their commercial proprietor, RefWorks. They could support the import of Zotero’s RDF export format, to allow Zotero users to switch to EndNote if they wanted to. They could embrace CSL in their own products, enabling Zotero’s styles to be used in EndNote.
Others have blogged about The Innovators Dilemma & I think this is germane–Thomson Reuters is an entrenched player & one part of their business is being disrupted. Whether or not their lawsuit is a success, they will need to adapt to survive. Fortunately, they have a lot of holdings, and many can be used as hedges against a loss in their revenues from desktop reference management software.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:25 am
It’s funny, but the lawsuit makes me want to use Zotero *more* not less
October 1st, 2008 at 2:03 pm
[...] surprising therefore that our sister blog Project Xiphos, has also covered this topic in a post The $10 million question…, which has received a thoughtful comment from Richard [...]