In a move that will surely engender goodwill and happy unicorns among librarians worldwide, Thomson-Reuters has fired a $10 million warning shot across the bow of -- get this -- academics at George Mason University. Dan Cohen and his crew in the Center for History and New Media at GMU recently released a new version of Zotero, the popular open source bibliographic software tool that allows academics to cite, share, and tag resources they find online. The response, in addition to a growing community of scholarly users worldwide, was a lawsuit from Thomeson-Reuters suggesting that GMU has reverse-engineered EndNote, T-R's proprietary bibliographic software. The crux of the injunction seems to be that Zotero infringes upon Thomson-Reuters EndNote product by allowing users to convert EndNotes proprietary .ens files to Zotero's freely distributable .csl files -- claiming that GMU reverse-engineered EndNote to create Zotero.
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September 30, 2008
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Thomson Reuters was wrong about Zotero decompiling EndNote & they are also wrong about the specifics of the feature.
Zotero had a feature to read-and-use the undocumented .ens format, but not to convert .ens files into distributable .csl files.
This feature has since been disabled.
Posted by: Rick | October 03, 2008 at 10:40 AM
Thanks for the update and clarification, Rick.
Posted by: Jason | October 03, 2008 at 11:21 AM