Thomson-Reuters Sues George Mason Over Zotero

[Greg Lambert]

In the category of "No good deed goes unpunished," seems that a product review by one of our own is mentioned today in the Legal Blog Watch.

Thomson is claiming that GMU's Zotero is a violation of Thomson's IP rights with EndNote and Thomson is "seeking an injunction against Zotero's distribution and $10 million in damages."

It looks like GMU is going to fight back against Thomson on this one. I wish them luck! And hope they prevail.

[Susanna Leers]

My friend Mike Madison, who teaches IP law here at Pitt, blogged about the case Sunday . I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Zotero has added Bluebook as one of their citation styles, and Westlaw just came out with a Bluebooking product? I also noticed that one of the databases that Zotero works with is LexisNexis.

[Roger Skalbeck]

Interestingly, it looks like one of the problems in the case was a claimed violation of a license agreement between ThomsonReuters and George Mason. As I read it, George Mason had a license for EndNote which (as Thomson claims), the university was violating. What's one option for avoiding prospective contract/license violation? Cancel the license and terminate the contract. In a sense, it looks like that's what has happened here.

Read more here for a note on the decision not to renew an EndNote contract: Zotero blog post: "Official Statement".

If you want to read the complaint, you can get a copy of the complaint from Courthouse News. Note that this is in a Virginia state court, and there are no copyright claims in this specific suit. Though some parallels can be drawn between possible complaints about abuse of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, no federal laws are at issue in this case (yet).

It's an interesting one to follow, to be sure.

[Roger Skalbeck]

EndNote maker's lawsuit over open-source Zotero dismissed -
An open source software project got some good news this week, as a judge dismissed a suit brought by the maker of a commercial alternative. Thomson Reuters, which makes EndNote, an academic reference management product, had filed suit against George Mason University, claiming that its support of the open source Zotero project, which imports EndNote files, was in contravention of the university's license to EndNote. The suit, which requested an injunction against the distribution of Zotero, has now been dismissed. Read it online here.