The suit claims that Zotero’s beta converted the undocumented .ens style files. It did not. It further alleges that Zotero’s devs encouraged users to perform this conversion. They did not. Finally, it alleges that Zotero is distributing .ens files and/or CSL derived from .ens. They are not.

Even if any of the above was happening, it is not clear that Thomson would have an IP claim. Many .ens files were not authored by Thomson Reuters, but by end users. Further, they are rather trivial recipes that might not warrant a copyright.

I am outraged because Zotero’s development is quite open–one can easily see that the Zotero team carefully weighed possible copyright issues & made the decision not to write a converter or to foster the sharing of .ens or .ens-derived styles. (This may be too conservative if the .ens files are so trivial as to be non-copyrightable (just as a recipe or formula cannot have a copyright), however it is the most that Thomson Reuters should be able to demand.)

What I find appalling is that Thomson has to resort to a frivolous intimidation suit that is full of false allegations, rather than actually competing on technological merit.

I have written styles for EndNote. Now Thomson is trying to tell me what I’m allowed to do with those styles. If anyone is treating my IP with disrespect, it is TR.

@KMLawson,
Sadly Thomson has alleged that Zotero is distributing these styles outright. This claim is meritless, though.

The style (.ens) format files that Thomson hosts on the Endnote site ore often created by EndNote users or journals. Just google RSFTSTYL and you will find piles of ens files on personal, journal and university websites. EndNote does have a utility to create these files and many users including me have made and distributed ens files.
I can’t see how Thomson can claim ownership of these files let alone accuse anyone in plagiarism or theft. In fact by recently adding a extremely restrictive license agreement to the ens files they themselves may be guilty of plagiarism. And yes, this implies that until very recently no restrictions (license, EULA etc) were attached to these files. Last time I checked you can prosecute someone if the action wasn’t illegal at the time it was performed.

Some key points:

-The styles themselves simply don’t belong to Endnote, they are openly available standards for citations. The idea that representing these files in a digitized format for use in the application, can be copyrighted is a matter of dispute.

-Even so, I don’t think anyone has claimed that Zotero comes with a download of all these style files, which would more clearly represent an example of some kind of “theft”

-There may be a case here of one kind of file, which itself translates an open citation format into a digitized format, being translated into another kind of format, that supported by Zotero. The idea that this act of translation constitutes a threat to copyright, is problematic and stands at the heart of many intellectual property rights disputes in the digital world. It is anything but a made-up controversy.

I have just recently noticed all of this seemingly made-up controversy surrounding the pending lawsuit between EndNote and Zotero. Having googled the documentation about this and read it for myself I don’t see what the fuss is about.

It seems from the court documents that Thomson is filing a suit against Zotero for what I can only assume was their beta this summer that allowed the average Zotero user to use EndNote styles for formatting references. Would anyone here disagree? (I am not sure why they are not suing Zotero over plagerism or intellectual property rights but I’m also not a lawyer.)

Regardless, if that is the case I do not find this appauling as some here clearly do and would like to ask those who are ‘outraged’ by this the following question: what right do the creators of Zotero have to take over 3000 files that the creators of EndNote have been building and maintaining for at least the last ten years and co-opt them for their own? Can you actually present an ethical arguement as to why Zotero should be able to not only ‘capitalize’ off the work of a company for Zotero’s latest release but also be able to continue to do so through updates that I regularly download for EndNote?

And the reason I ask this, I would have to guess, is that no one who has bashed EndNote here seems to be thinking along the lines of the following: what if this was your paper and someone came along and plagerized it? By that I don’t mean referenced it, but I mean litterally copied a paper that you had spent a couple of years researching and claimed it for their own. I can imagine how I would feel about such an instance.

You might think that I’m some grovelling Thomson apologist but I’m not. EndNote has had some bad or uninteresting upgrades in recent history and when they don’t present a compelling reason to me to upgrade I don’t do so. And if Zotero, RefWorks or some other package were clearly as superior to EndNote then I would easily switch. None-the-less, that is not the case and actually is not relevant to the question I posed.

* A note to Thomson: Why is it WriteNote, a product that has seemingly been discontinued, and could capture online resources like online journals and EndNote cannot? I would have to think that I could easily stop using Zotero and not have to export reference information from Zotero if EndNote could do what WriteNote did. In fact, I would pay for an upgrade.

Zotero does have a role to play in the future of academic software. It already has some features which Endnote could only dream of. No lawsuit can change that.

Personally, I wish academic software would go a lot further than citation management. Zotero and RefWorks already do some things which are beyond the usual bibliography management (media annotation with Zotero’s Vertov or RSS feeds for RefShare comments). But it’s easy to think of a system which would go much further in terms of facilitating research and publication. Especially if we think about the connections between academic writing and blogging.
My personal hunch is that the institution with the best toolbox to create the ultimate tool for academic research and publication is… Google. Google Scholar is already encroaching on Thomson’s Web of Knowledge territory. The PageRank algorithm, based on academic citations, can come back to academia. Several of Google’s products can be used for research and publication (Docs, Reader, Notebooks, Bookmarks, etc.). Google Books already include a lot of academic texts as well as texts which are useful in academic contexts. And Google’s “corporate culture” still seems to have some academic foundations.
Yes, it may sound crazy. But Google may be Thomson’s worst nightmare. If Google were to help Zotero (and maybe integrate it in Chrome), Thomson would find its match.

On this point:

Once the .ens output style files, which are all under 50k in size can be interpreted, it is a simple matter, though of dubious legality, for scholars and students to email each other the dozen or so .ens files of journals or institutions most important for their field either in the original format or, if the feature is eventually made available, converted into .csl files.

I’ve been saying for awhile that converting Endnote style files is a distraction, and that the real focus needs to be on making it easier to create CSL files. CSL has one major benefit over other alternatives (like Endnote’s): it’s been designed for the internet. Users no longer have to even think about the style files; they just click a link to install it.

At the moment, Zotero is the primary host of these styles, but you could imagine that in time journals might decide to develop and host their own styles.