Comments on: Copyright creep?

By: Mr code

Mr code — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:28:05 +0000

Here’s a scenario. What if the developers of Zotero bought a copy of EndNote. Would that package’s EULA apply or would the fact that the university that employed them had a site license agreement take precedence? Curious about that one — do university site licenses entangle faculty?

By: Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:22:36 +0000

My point was not that they had succeeded in writing a license agreement that would actually prohibit what GMU is supposed to have done, only that they tried to do so (or are trying in retrospect to make the agreement stretch) and are therefore alleging a breach of the EULA rather than making a copyright infringement complaint.

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:30:06 +0000

Rather than rely on copyright law, they wrote a license agreement to try to prevent what they allege took place at GMU.

Did they really? Nothing in the agreement I have read discusses file formats explicitly–it discusses decompiling the software. The complaint must therefore allege that the Zotero developers decompiled EndNote, which probably did not occur.

Everything else you say is spot on & we do need to be more careful to keep data as open as possible.