We’re still waiting for the court reporter’s transcript from last week’s dismissal of the lawsuit filed by Thomson Reuters targeting Zotero, but a few more details have surfaced regarding the nature of the ruling.
Judge Gaylord L. Finch, Jr. dismissed the Thomson Reuters complaint due to a lack of jurisdiction. The dismissal was without prejudice, which means that the judge did not bar Thomson Reuters from refiling its lawsuit. Whether the corporation can or will refile is unknown (to me) at this point.
While it does not appear that the judge dealt with much if any of the merits of Thomson Reuters’s complaint, the dismissal is significant for a couple of reasons. First, it would seem to require that Thomson Reuters and its not insubstantial legal team effectively start over, when they have already doubtless incurred significant costs preparing for litigation.
Second, and far more important, the landscape has changed dramatically since Thomson Reuters initially filed its lawsuit, not least of which in way that the research community (very broadly construed) has vehemently criticized Thomson Reuters’s actions. Thomson Reuters going into the original lawsuit last fall could only speculate about how academics, students, and researchers might respond to its legal complaint, but by now it has become clear that the lawsuit has inspired widespread hostility toward the corporation and its software.
As co-directors of the Zotero project, Dan Cohen and I are keen to put this lawsuit behind us, but we are also strongly committed to ensuring that Zotero and its development community can continue to innovate unfettered. We are humbled by the unanimous outpouring of support for Zotero by scholars, librarians, jocks, and nerds, and we eagerly anticipate many years to come of fruitful intellectual and technological dialogue.
Update: GMU has issued a formal statement on the dismissal.
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.
As co-director of the Zotero project along with Dan Cohen, I [...]
Today Olivia Judson features Zotero in her excellent science blog, The Wild Side. In a generally positive review Judson points to Zotero’s ease of use and ability to grab metadata from a variety of sources. Fortunately for Zoterons, the features that Judson finds lacking in Zotero are already present in either the current 1.0.7 release [...]
Sarah and I recently traveled to Québec, where I gave a paper at a French history conference. I’ve included our dining notes below:
Thursday. The trip does not begin auspiciously.
Le Cochon Dingue: Dessicated luke-warm mussels served in an undesirably farinaceous “cream” sauce. Alarming.
Le Café St. Malo: Bourride-like fish soup was a good start. Sarah’s blood sausage [...]
Notice anything different?
Aside from the addition of “Login” and “Register” links to the upper right corner of the Zotero site, you might not detect many changes. The most visible difference is new unified login functionality to support the site’s various functional modules. Users can also now use an OpenID account to authenticate with the Zotero [...]
The full press release can be found at the university’s media relations site, but the upshot is that George Mason University has formulated a strong response that includes dropping its EndNote license and retaining the Zotero project’s contested EndNote compatibility feature. This functionality allows users to read their own EndNote styles (.ens files) and has [...]
In a recent New York Review of Books piece, “The Library in the New Age”, Robert Darnton offers his thoughts on the research library in the digital age. Darnton argues persuasively against any real displacement of traditional media by digital resources, suggesting instead that these two should complement each other rather than converge. As a [...]
The Times has a great story today by Alex Wright on Paul Otlet’s early efforts to create a network of the information akin to today’s Web. In spite of bloviating along the lines of “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century” (Kelvin Kelly, quoted for the article, apparently both [...]
Hands down my current favorite Korean barbecue destination, Oegadgib features first-rate all-you-can-eat action. You’ll get pork belly, shortribs, and ribeye along with a relatively small selection of quality banchan (think 10 options rather than 30). Their only sign is in Hangul, so you’ll want to keep your eyes out for Jerry’s Subs and the Austin [...]
Long lines, bland sandwiches, mushy pizza. What’s not to like?