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.

Legal news wire service Courthouse News reported recently that Reuters was suing the Commonwealth of Virginia because George Mason University was "handing out its proprietary software." Nothing is ever that simple, is it?

George Mason University's Center for History and New Media distributes Zotero, an open source Firefox extension that helps users manage citations found on the web. It performs a similar function as Thomson Reuter's EndNote software. The lawsuit is based on the premise that Zotero's newest beta is able to convert the proprietary EndNote format to the open CSL (Citation Style Language) format. A lawsuit over a file format conversion?

For years, I've been looking for a serious online research tool that would let me not just add to the ratnest of bookmarks and "favorites" I have, but really control, annotate, correlate, tag and source online material. Last week, as I was gearing up to join WWD, I found an awesomely deep, free, open source and innovative tool in the form of a super-stable FireFox 2.0 extension: Zotero.