Plenty of education bloggers are up in arms this week over Thomson Reuters Inc.‘s lawsuit against George Mason University over the university’s free software tool designed to make scholars’ lives easier. But the company also has some defenders online — including a few free-software advocates — who agree that the company should defend against a free tool that piggy-backs on its software development.
As we noted earlier this week, Thomson Reuters Inc. sued the university in a Virginia court this month, arguing that a free software tool made by the university makes improper use of the company’s EndNote citation software.
Thomson Reuters says that programmers at George Mason’s Center for History and New Media reverse-engineered EndNote to create a free program called Zotero, which can import files created by EndNote and turn them into files that can be used and shared online using Zotero.
Most reaction within the education blogosphere this week has been hostile to Thomson Reuters. “Boycott Thomson Reuters,” insisted one blogger, echoing a call on several other blogs.
“For my part, I’m going to refuse to use Reuters’ software in future, strongly discourage graduate students from buying EndNote, and try to get this message out to my colleagues too,” wrote Henry Farrell, an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University, on the popular academic blog Crooked Timber. “If I taught any classes where Thomson printed relevant textbooks, I would be strongly inclined not to use these texts either. I encourage you to do the same.”
Even if the lawsuit has merit, the approach of suing rather than working out a deal with the university is terrible public relations in an academic community that values openness, said James Grimmelmann, an associate professor of law at New York Law School who wrote about the issue on his blog. “Using lawsuits like this to squelch a freely shared and very valued piece of software has very terrible PR effects,” he said in an interview with The Chronicle this week. “This is exactly the wrong way to sell to an audience that cares about sharing.”
Officials from the company declined to comment, but the complaint suggests that the company did contact George Mason officials and started talks — which somehow stalled — before filing the lawsuit. To Mr. Grimmelmann, that suggests that the parties will eventually settle the matter out of court. “If Thomson Reuters had any sense here they’d settle,” he said.
But Michael Feldstein, who runs a technology blog called e-Literate, argues that the company might have a point.
“The specific feature they copied enables users to steal the labor that Thomson Reuters invested in creating an importer for each one of those many journals. That seems wrong to me,” wrote Mr. Feldstein. “I’m going to think about it some more, but my reaction at the moment is that the Zotero team should remove that importer feature, negotiate a settlement with Thomson Reuters, and compete honestly by finding a way to crowdsource the creation of their own import style files for various journals. If a company like Thomson Reuters is investing many person/hours into creating features that benefit academics, it is in nobody’s interest to discourage them—and, more importantly, other companies that may follow them into the market—by simply stealing the product of their labor.” —Jeffrey R. Young
