[Novalug] GMU sued over Zotero software

[Ross Patterson]

At 15:56 10/14/2008, James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:
>Seems to be Much Ado About Nothing. Adding a few sentences of the form
>"EndNote is a Product and Trademark of Thomson Reuters" throughout the
>documentation ought to do it.

Not if Thomson's claim that Zotero violates its contract with GMU is 
accepted by the court.  And that will certainly be the center of any 
case should it go to court.  I don't know that a court could give 
Thomson much satisfaction - the source is already on the net, all the 
court could reasonably do is require GMU to destroy their copies of 
it and award monetary damages.  In an ironic twist, GMU could very 
well wind up the only organization forbidden to use the software it created.

This kind of thing is why folks who are serious about software and 
the law do clean-room reimplementations and require contributors to 
never look at the software they're replicating.  The Blackdown 
Project managed to do a very good Java implementation just this way, 
and to protect themselves from Sun when Sun wasn't particularly 
friendly to Open Source.

Ross