Thomas Reuters Lawsuit Against George Mason Software Gets Dropped

Last year Thomson Reuters filed a lawsuit against Virginia’s George Mason University.  George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media had created a bibliography software called Zotero and Thomson Reuters believed that they violated copyright as a result.  George Mason had supposedly reverse engineered Thomson Reuters’ bibliography software called EndNote.

Zotero has the ability to open files using EndNote and save them as open formats.  Thomson Reuters’ license agreement prohibits software from having that sort of functionality.  Thomson Reuters was asking for $10 million in damages as a result.  A few days ago the lawsuit was dismissed by a Virginia Circuit Court judge.

Zotero works as a Mozilla Firefox plug-in that enabled people to store and organize research.  It has been downloaded over one million times since last September.  George Mason University said that they had no renewed a license for EndNote and will not make any changes to the software.

[via TechDirt]

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