Thomson Reuters Lawsuit Against Zotero Dismissed

Sean, a Zotero co-​​director, announced yes­ter­day that the law­suit filed by Thomson Reuters (mak­ers of EndNote) was dis­missed yesterday:

I’m delighted to announce that this morn­ing the Fairfax Circuit Court dis­missed the law­suit filed against Zotero by Thomson Reuters. The law­suit had claimed that the Center for History and New Media “reverse-​​engineered” Thomson Reuters’s EndNote soft­ware to pro­vide data inter­op­er­abil­ity between Zotero and EndNote.

via Thomson Reuters Lawsuit Dismissed at The Quintessence of Ham.

While some are billing this as a vic­tory for open-​​source soft­ware — which, in some sense at least, it is, since it avoids a fur­ther attack on this front against Zotero devel­op­ment — the case was never quite about copy­right or open source. In its essense, this case instead focused on a con­tract claim that George Mason University vio­lated the EndNote con­tract by devel­op­ing an “import” fea­ture for Zotero. The GMU site license for EndNote (which I under­stand GMU did not renew) for­bid reverse engi­neer­ing, and Thomson Reuters believed that this was the method used by Zotero’s devel­op­ers to cre­ate the EndNote import function.

Details are still sketchy, but Sean promises to have court tran­scripts up next week.

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