This is equivalent to someone reverse engineering a pharmaceutical drug, or stealing the design of your website, or its content, and relabelling it as their own.

No–content is typically expressive & merits a copyright. Citation formatting is making trivial recipes that are patterned after styles displayed by particular publishers. Having made citation styles myself, I an of the opinion that they probably can’t carry a copyright (though I apply a creative commons license “just in case I am wrong”).

Furthermore, stealing design or content an relabeling it is plagiarism. There is none in this case–that Zotero used the trademark “EndNote” to describe the ability to use .ens files as-is is part of the complaint.

This is somewhat analogous to OpenOffice.org and Google Docs being able to read the previously undocumented Microsoft Office formats (those formats are more complex & the other products can convert and write to the undocumented formats, though).

In any case, interoperability improves system efficiency.

2) Zotero is superior. Endnote allows you to export to CSV (or some other text format, I forget), which you can then import into Zotero.

BibTeX and RIS are the textual formats you can import into Zotero. But the bibliographic data has nothing to do with this case.

You are correct to point out that development of Zotero breached contract terms set forth in the site license

As you later commented, they are accused of breaching contract; there is no evidence that they actually did & it has been pointed out many places that the Thomson Reuters complaint is wrong about many things.

there is a *second* claim against GMU, one of infringing trademark. These cases fall under IP

Actually, it is still a contract complaint–the complaint alleges that the contract put additional limitations on what could be done with the EndNote trademark. Of any complaints, I think that this is one of the more valid ones–while the use of the term does not create confusion, the contract does explicitly limit use of the term to an even greater extent. I don’t think this caused $10M of real and substantive damages & it shouldn’t warrant an injunction, though.

It would be interesting to see what’s in their actual site license agreement.

The complaint has excerpts of said agreement, but I agree that picking apart the whole thing would be nice.

That’s a good point regarding anti-competitive practices though. It would seem that they would be arguing against themselves in that way. That said, you would presume their own lawyers would have seen that. (Maybe not.)

Regarding the trademark infringement, I too am doubtful that they have a case there. I’ve never seen Zotero do anything to cause confusion in my mind.

It will be interesting to see what happens here.
-Bob

Thanks for the question. As I’ve learned intellectual property law, there are several classes of IP:

1) Copyright
2) Patent
3) Trademark
4) others

Each are governed by different laws, common or legislated. They are all under the umbrella of IP.

You are correct to point out that development of Zotero breached contract terms set forth in the site license (probably along the lines of not endorsing competing products, though I have *not* looked at the specifics). This falls under contract law, of course, and Thomson would and should be compensated if GMU is in breach. However, as I understand it, a department (the history department? some department under the College of Humanities) developed this as its own project, using resources available through the university. I doubt developing a rival product is against the contract, since this would essentially be a restraint on competition, and we wander into antitrust territory (or at least anti-competitive practices–other anti-competitive practices, including retail price fixing–the reason for M*S*RP–and product bundling, are often litigated).

But I digress. It seems from the statement you’ve quoted that there is a *second* claim against GMU, one of infringing trademark. These cases fall under IP but are difficult to litigate, since well-known trademarks often become proxy-words for generic products (Band Aid, Kleenex, Listerine, etc, etc.). I don’t specialize in either area, nor do I specialize in law, but it’s something I’ve studied extensively to this point and know just enough to form an opinion.

Cheers!

1) As a student of law and economics, I must stress the case, as you’ve quoted it, is over reverse-engineering proprietary data structure. This is equivalent to someone reverse engineering a pharmaceutical drug, or stealing the design of your website, or its content, and relabelling it as their own. While this may increase “wealth” in the short run, in the long run it serves to undermine the incentive to create. Anything.

2) Zotero is superior. Endnote allows you to export to CSV (or some other text format, I forget), which you can then import into Zotero. This extra step allows inter-operability without breaking intellectual property law. Endnote users and Zotero users independently want these features (text-based databases for programs like BibTeX). The fact that they can cross over is a by-product, and a wealth-increasing one at that (we’re all better off).