[Infowarrior] - EndNote case headed to court

[Richard Forno]

EndNote reverse-engineering case looks headed to courtroom

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081104-endnote-reverse-engineering-case-looks-headed-to-courtroom.html

By Jonathan M. Gitlin | Published: November 04, 2008 - 07:35AM CT

As anyone who works in academia knows, writing and publishing papers  
involves frequently citing the existing literature. When you're  
working on a paper with 30 or more references, keeping track of them  
all can be a downright pain, which is where reference-managing  
software like Thomson Reuters' EndNote comes in. EndNote is the market  
leader in this field, but recently it has been facing competition from  
the open source Zotero, which is a Firefox plugin that lets you manage  
your bibliographic library and insert references into papers. Right  
now though, EndNote and Zotero are locked in a legal battle over  
claims by Thomson Reuters that the developers of Zotero have illegally  
reverse-engineered aspects of EndNote.

Although EndNote has its position as the 800lb gorilla in the  
reference manager field, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that  
many users view the application with a measure of antipathy. It can  
sometimes be frustrating to use, and the company's practice of rolling  
out updates that can appear to be bug fixes with a $99 price tag has  
created an environment where other developers have begun to enter the  
market with competing solutions.

As I noted in my Office 2008 review, Microsoft has inserted a  
reference manager into the new versions of Word, but where EndNote  
triumphs over others is the vast breadth of output styles available to  
users. These are necessary, as individual journals often have subtly  
different ways that they want citations to be presented; references  
shown in the text as numbered articles that are then listed in that  
order in the bibliography, or listed in the text as (author name,  
year) and then listed alphabetically, for example.

Given that the process of publication can sometimes involve sending  
the same manuscript to more than one journal, being able to reformat  
the way the references are presented is an invaluable tool. By virtue  
of being a market leader with a long history in the field, EndNote is  
able to offer the widest selection of these output styles as  
downloads, and by virtue of their large selection of output styles,  
they remain the market leader.

Zotero is an open source project led by a pair of academics, Dan Cohen  
and Sean Takats, at George Mason University's Center for History and  
New Media. Zotero is a plugin for the Firefox browser, and therefore  
cross-platform, and also has the advantage of being free. It also  
includes functionality similar to the Mac OS X application Papers, in  
that it manages PDF libraries, as well as offering users a way to  
insert references into a document.

The lawsuit, brought by Thomson Reuters against George Mason  
University and the Comptroller of Virginia, alleges that GMU is in  
contravention of their EndNote license with their newest version of  
Zotero, thanks to Zotero having allegedly reverse-engineered the file  
format that EndNote uses for citation styles in order to offer a  
similar functionality in Zotero. Thomson Reuters claims that GMU is  
causing "irreparable harm" to its brand, and is seeking to prevent GMU  
from distributing the offending application, as well as significant  
financial damages.

GMU denies this claim, insisting that, although Zotero can read  
EndNote's .ens files, the application does not convert that data to  
Zotero's .csl format. GMU has decided not to renew its site license  
for EndNote, and has re-released the controversial Zotero 1.5 Sync  
Preview.

For its part, Thomson Reuters remain resolute in its claim that Zotero  
infringes on their intellectual property and that GMU violated the  
terms of their site license. According to Thomson Reuters VP Dave  
Kochalko, "These format files only exist as software code; there is no  
content or information independent of lines of code and these files  
can only be interpreted by the computer. A key value of EndNote is its  
ability to format a bibliography within a manuscript and the format  
files are integral to that capability."

Kochalko also maintains that "We have worked diligently over the past  
several months to resolve this matter amicably. Since it has become  
clear that a resolution is not possible at this time, we have no  
choice but to pursue litigation in order to protect our intellectual  
property, as well as protect our bibliographic formatting capability,  
an important publishing resource our EndNote user-community has relied  
upon for many years."

As things currently stand, it seems that this case will be heard in  
front of a court, which will have to decide if GMU really did reverse- 
engineer EndNote's style files.