

EndNote maker's lawsuit over open-source Zotero dismissed - jballanc
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/06/thomson-reuters-suit-against-zotero-software-dismissed.ars

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davidblair
Suing over a feature is screaming that your competitor got it right and
everyone should look.

It is great advertising for the other company, even if you do win.

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mustpax
It also speaks volumes when a company would rather direct resources towards
litigation instead of innovation. Engineers tend to be cheaper than lawyers
and legal maneuvering will only delay the demise of an inferior product
temporarily.

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ShabbyDoo
The linked article said that GMU was sued for violating its license agreement
with EndNote. So, this isn't the same question as whether or not a third party
app may read/write MSOffice file formats. If an organization signs a license
agreement stating that all users of data aggregated by Product A must access
that data via a licensed copy of that product but instead issues some of its
employees Product B which reads Product A's data, isn't that a legitimate
license violation? I probably wouldn't enter into such an agreement as a
customer, but one could conceivably do so. We don't actually know from the
article what the case was about or what the judges ruled upon.

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nudded
It is impossible to 'unlicense' the right to reverse engineer. (if you reverse
engineer only to support another company's format.). If i'm wrong on this one,
let me know.

EndNote didn't stand a chance in court.

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RK
_The case could have addressed some interesting questions, such as the degree
to which duplicating functionality falls under the definition of reverse
engineering, and whether a file-format translator is a derivative work, as
well as whether it's legally permissible to prohibit either of these._

Have these questions not been addressed before in court?

