Thomson Reuters Sues Open Source Project, State University
According to reports, Thomson Reuters, the owned of the EndNote software product, has sued an open source development project competing with EndNote. The competing product, known as Zotero, is being developed by an open source community hosted at George Mason University. The complaint alleges that the project members reverse engineered the EndNote citation file format in violation of EndNote’s end user license agreement.
This could become an important open source/licensing case. Resolution of the issues raised could result either in stopping open source developments of competitive products or holding “no reverse engineering” clauses unenforceable, either of which would cause a lot of chaos in the software community.
Cases can end up be resolved on other grounds. For example, because the case takes place at a state university, the court might dismiss it on grounds of sovereign immunity — see for example, this article discussing a case in California (Marketing Information Masters v. The Trustees of the California State University) which held that state universities and employees were immune from claims for copyright infringement.