Odds & Ends
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Bullies
Linked to the topic of this page because it relates to film scholarship is the news that Thomson Reuters have filed a lawsuit against Zotero. As I've written before, I've been using Zotero since I returned to study. I actually get free access to Thomson Reuters' very expensive Endnote software, but have chosen to use Zotero because it's better. I have been building a database of articles using Zotero, and used its Word plugin to manage my citations when I did the first chapter of my Masters. It's fantastic, with the citation management in my document completely seamless and trouble free, and its information capturing abilities (grabbing citation details from library catalogues, journal databases, and other such sources) invaluable. In short, its brilliant. Given it's a free product, and Endnote costs several hundred dollars, you can see why the Thomson Reuters are worried. While I have no insight into the legalities of the case, what Thomson Reuters are doing certainly seems intuitively unjust: they're accusing Zotero of misusing Endnotes' file formats by reverse engineering them. This hits at the ability of Zotero to import and export Endnote's data files [edit - this probably should just say "read", not "import and export" - see corrections in the comments]: it's roughly the equivalent of Microsoft going after OpenOffice for its ability to open and save Word files. Thomson Reuters' statement about the suit says that they "are absolutely a proponent of interoperability and easy data sharing provided contracts are not breached and intellectual property is respected." Which is a bit disingenuous when the contract they don't want breached is a contract preventing interoperability and easy data sharing. There's some interesting background and discussion here, here, here, and here. The comments of Mike Madison are particularly interesting (and depressing): I don't use the software, so I'm speculating a little bit: It looks like the timing of the complaint, and this extraordinary demand to kill Zotero functionality for Zotero users, is related to the imminent release of a Zotero update that would create a shared Zotero commons. Zotero users could easy share their source data with other Zotero users. The complaint challenges the heart of the scholarly research enterprise, the premise that knowledge should be available to all and shareable by all. Thomson/Reuters would like to say, apparently, that if you put that knowledge into EndNote, then Thomson/Reuters is your gatekeeper. That's shameful.Thomson Reuters' complaint itself is here. In the meantime, I suggest any academic type readers I might have spread the zotero word (you can get it from the link below), and urge their universities to promote Zotero and / or cancel their EndNote site licenses.  Labels: commentary, research, zotero Comments |
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