Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Litigation to protect proprietary formats
According to Danny Weitzner's blog, Reuters has taken legal action against the developer of Zotero, an open-source Firefox extension, for allegedly reverse-engineering the citation file format of EndNote. Weitzner's focus is on the Semantic Web, but the action could have a serious impact on digital preservation efforts as well. If a company can make it illegal to reverse-engineer its file format, then any information stored in the format becomes a dead end which can't be recovered when the format is no longer supported.
Since the suit is based on alleged violation of Reuters's EULA (or perhaps its site license agreement, according to the first comment), there would still be room to reverse-engineer formats from data files alone, using a documented clean-room approach. But it can be very difficult or even impossible to reverse-engineer a format without testing it against existing software.
Updates on the EndNote/Zotero Lawsuit (Disruptive Library Technology Jester>
