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File Format Brouhaha Pits FOSS Against Proprietary

How legally defensible are proprietary data formats? That's the question asked in this fascinating piece from Nature. The story reports on a lawsuit brought against George Mason University (GMU) by Thomson Reuters. Thomson is seeking $10 million in damages annually from GMU, according to the report, and open source software and file formats are  at the heart of the conflict.

As Nature reports:

"Dan Cohen, director of GMU's Center for History and New Media, and Sean Takats, a GMU history professor, are also directors of Zotero: open-source software developed by the history centre that lets researchers organize and share their digital information iTunes style, whether it is in the form of citations, documents or web pages."

Zotero is free, open source software (you can use it as a Firefox extension), but the problem that Nature reports is that Thomson makes a proprietary bibliography-creation software product called EndNote. The company claims that Zotero allegedly allows EndNote's proprietary data format for storing citations in bibliographies to be converted to an open format that not only Zotero but other applications can access. According to Nature: "Thomson claims that Zotero 'reverse engineered or decompiled' not only the format, but also the EndNote software itself."

If Thomson proves that the folks at Zotero did decompile the EndNote software, it may have legal grounds for its argument. On the other hand, even Microsoft has made many of its popular application file formats shareable by other applications. It's perfectly legal for OpenOffice and AbiWord to open and save .doc files, for example.

The GMU-vs.-Thomson case is a classic example of how open source solutions are starting to butt heads with proprietary ones. At the file format level, it would be good not to see territorial behavior--especially for applications used primarily by the academic and research communities.

I'm not saying there won't be territorial behavior. I'm saying it would be good not to see it.

• Zotero
• EndNote

by an anonymous user on Oct. 10, 2008

I think Thompson is missing a great opportunity here to become a leading data format to organize bibliography data.

If Zotero did build software to read and save in EndNote format that is likely because there is some need and a large number of docs in that format. So beyond the arguments of this specific case, Thompson can learn and adopt its format and create great many add-ons and services for a much wider market!

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by Unmukt on Oct. 16, 2008

It appears that EndNote is protecting the propreitery format as atrade secret. If it has been reversed engineered then it seems strange that any legal action can be be taken. Had it been stolen then the matter would have been diiferent.

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by Bruce on Dec. 11, 2008

Just a correction on this:

The company claims that Zotero allegedly allows EndNote's proprietary data format for storing citations in bibliographies to be converted to an open format that not only Zotero but other applications can access.

Actually, the format in question specifies configuration of citation and bibliographic styling. It is conceptually equivalent to, say, a word-processor template file. But the claim Thomson Reuters makes that Zotero "converts" these files is just factually wrong (and easily verifiable if they'd done their homework).

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