Down with Reuters!

26 Sep 2008 . . Comments

#zotero #reuters #lawsuit

A couple of years I went to up the Center for History and New Media with a few folks here at William and Mary and talked with Roy Rosensweig about this cool new thing they were working on for Firefox. He told us the story of how they were searching for a name for this, and someone suggested they use Albanian. After looking up some words in the dictionary, they settled on Zotero.

To me, it is one of the most import and useful tools any scholar can posses. My one gripe with it was that if you were working on something on a computer at say, work, and then went home to do more work, there wasn’t a great way to syncrhonize everything. I resourced to portable Firefox on a USB stick which worked reasonably well. Now, with the 1.5 Synch preview, I don’t need that any more. I can even synch it up to my server (I set up my own WebDAV and store my docs on that system).

Needless to say, I’m a huge fan. It’s not quite FOSS (which would just top this off), but it’s pretty close. Shoot, I even recently got a questionnaire about Zotero use for an article from a Law student.

Anyway, the point of all of this rambling is to set up my absolute disgust when I read Reuters (makers of End Note) are suing George Mason for Zotero for $10,000,000. It seems Zotero’s ability to convert its proprietary “ens” format into Zotero violates its copyright.

Hopefully they won’t sue the Vufind project for allowing people to download references into End Note. Shoot, at this point, I’m ready to make it not a feature on principal…