Sean, a Zotero co-director, announced yesterday that the lawsuit filed by Thomson Reuters (makers of EndNote) was dismissed yesterday:

I’m delighted to announce that this morning the Fairfax Circuit Court dismissed the lawsuit filed against Zotero by Thomson Reuters. The lawsuit had claimed that the Center for History and New Media “reverse-engineered” Thomson Reuters’s EndNote software to provide data interoperability between Zotero and EndNote.

via Thomson Reuters Lawsuit Dismissed at The Quintessence of Ham.

While some are billing this as a victory for open-source software — which, in some sense at least, it is, since it avoids a further attack on this front against Zotero development — the case was never quite about copyright or open source. In its essense, this case instead focused on a contract claim that George Mason University violated the EndNote contract by developing an “import” feature for Zotero. The GMU site license for EndNote (which I understand GMU did not renew) forbid reverse engineering, and Thomson Reuters believed that this was the method used by Zotero’s developers to create the EndNote import function.

Details are still sketchy, but Sean promises to have court transcripts up next week.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has introduced a useful new tool called TOSBack:

Terms-Of-Service and other website policies form the foundation of your relationship with social networking sites, online businesses, and other Internet communities. But most people become aware of these terms only when there’s a problem. TOSBack was created to help you monitor the policies for the websites you use everyday, and show how they change over time.

via TOSBack | The Terms-Of-Service Tracker.

A few examples of recent highlights from the tool include:

• Facebook’s policies changed on June 2nd
• GoDaddy changed its Domain Name Registration Agreement on May 22nd
• eBay changed its User Agreement on May 15th

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• EFF tracking policy changes at Google, Facebook and others (news.cnet.com)
• EFF Posts ‘Terms of Service’ Tracker (wired.com)
• TOSBack Monitors Terms of Service Changes to Google, Facebook, and 42 Others (lifehacker.com)
• TOSBack: EFF’s Much-Needed Terms of Service Tracker (radar.oreilly.com)