Am I wrong, though, in thinking that a clean-room recreation of the Zotero
code that parses .ens files would be legal (although the use of ISI-provided
.ens files would still be, at best, questionable)? If so, I'd like to
encourage everyone who might be interested in working on such a project to
*not* look at any Zotero code. At all. If this holds up and the offending
code is removed, anyone re-engineering it would need to have never been in
contact with the original code.

Or (as I started with), am I wrong?


On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 12:38 PM, Edward M. Corrado <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Klein, Michael wrote:
>
>> Edward M. Corrado wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> This will be interesting to see how it works out. From what I read, it
>>> looks like the case that Thomson has is based on, or at least strongly
>>> enhanced by, the EULA. Thus, the legal questions may end up being 1) is
>>> "freeing" data from a proprietary file format aviolation of
>>> copyright/patent/ etc.? and if not, 2) can you sign that away by
>>> agreeing to an EULA?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Two points:
>>
>> First, it's my understanding that contract law trumps basic civil law in
>> almost all cases. Unless you can convince a court that you entered into
>> the
>> contract under duress, or that the part of the contract in question is a
>> violation of a basic unabridgeable right (this last being the reason a lot
>> of employment contract non-compete clauses are unenforceable in several
>> right-to-work states), you're bound by it. I think you'd be hard pressed
>> to
>> argue that reverse engineering is a Basic Right Of Humankind. Unless...The
>> First Amendment guarantees the Right of Assembly. Can we extrapolate that
>> and argue for a Right of Disassembly? ;-)
>>
>> Second, this isn't a EULA in the sense of "By opening this package, you
>> agree..." or "By clicking this, you agree..."  Those kinds of contracts
>> are
>> questionable. It's an actual contract granting GMU a site license for the
>> Endnote software, negotiated by Thomson and GMU and agreed to in writing
>> on
>> both sides.
>>
>>
>
> This is a very good point.
>
>  I'll be disappointed if Thomson Reuters prevails on this one, but I won't
>> be
>> surprised, either, based on my own (admittedly limited) understanding.
>>
>>
>>
> Same here. If it wasn't for the EULA I'd probably think differently.
>
> Edward
>



-- 
Bill Dueber
Library Systems Programmer
University of Michigan Library