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Thomson Reuters Sues Over Open-Source Endnote-Alike Zotero 181

Posted by timothy on Saturday September 27, 2008 @06:52PM from the gmu-also-home-of-econtalk dept.

Noksagt writes "Thomson Reuters, the owner of the Endnote reference management software, has filed a $10 million lawsuit and a request for injunction against the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia's George Mason University develops Zotero, a free and open source plugin to Mozilla Firefox that researchers may use to manage citations. Thomson alleges that GMU's Center for History and New Media reverse engineered Endnote and that the beta version of Zotero can convert (in violation of the Endnote EULA) the proprietary style files that are used by Endnote to format citations into the open CSL file format."

Submission + - Canada's new DMCA considered worst copyright law (theglobeandmail.com)

Submitted by

loconet

on Thursday November 29, 2007 @01:59AM

loconet writes: "The government of Canada is preparing to attempt to bring a new DMCA-modeled copyright law in Canada in order to comply with the WIPO treaties the country signed in 1997. These treaties were also the base of the American DMCA. The new Canadian law will be even more restrictive in nature than the American version and worse than the last Canadian copyright proposal, the defeated Bill C-60. Amongst the many restrictive clauses, in this new law — as Michael Geist explains — is the total abolishment of the concept of fair use, "No parody exception. No time shifting exception. No device shifting exception. No expanded backup provision. Nothing.". Michael Geist provides a list of 30 things that can be done to address the issue."

Submission + - Hackers Exploit SafeDisc DRM in Windows XP

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06, 2007 @09:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: InfoWorld has a story on how hackers are taking advantage of a privilege escalation bug in the SafeDisc DRM that ships with Windows XP and Server 2003. What I wonder is why did Microsoft include this more subtle DRM at all, and can't users simply remove the secdrv.sys file and avoid what could be a slimy patch/secret DRM upgrade?

Read: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/11/06/Hackers-exploiting-bug-in-DRM-shipped-with-Windows_1.html

Submission + - Microsoft fires its CIO after investigation

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Tuesday November 06, 2007 @09:42PM

Stony Stevenson writes: Microsoft has fired its chief information officer, Stuart Scott. "We can confirm that Stuart Scott was terminated after an investigation for violation of company policies," the company said. "We have no further information to share." But according to this article, Microsoft is already looking for a replacement. Microsoft General Manager Shahla Aly and Alain Crozier, a Microsoft VP in charge of the company's CFO, sales, marketing and services group will take over Scott's duties while Microsoft looks around.

Submission + - Scary New Book on Privacy (gwu.edu)

Submitted by

pasquafa

on Tuesday November 06, 2007 @09:19PM

pasquafa writes: "Dan Solove earlier showed us why "I've Got Nothing to Hide" is a foolish reason to brush off privacy concerns. Now his book The Future of Reputation shows us that we've all got a lot to fear from new surveillance technologies. In past articles, Solove's done a great job advocating for individual rights against big data aggregators like Choicepoint, banks, and the government. His latest book breaks new ground because it focuses on a harder issue: how to deal with Web 2.0's swarm of privacy-invading individuals. When it comes to privacy, we may well be our own worst enemies. Against the tide of knee-jerk libertarianism, Solove demonstrates that there are some baseline norms that should govern the spread of personally identifiable information, gossip, and rumors. He even offers hope that the blogosphere can become a more fair, decent, and perhaps even public-minded place."

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