GMU sued for Zotero

thank you for this. Couldn’t agree more with every single thing you write. I’ve already started to talk to librarians at my school (which has an EndNote campus license) to try to convince them to put pressure on Reuters/Thomson.

I’m afraid I must disagree, at least in part. While I agree that Thomson/Reuters should have put more effort into web interoperability, I am troubled by the use of federal dollars to support the development of a competitive product (even free ones).

Imagine yourself as the owner or employee of a company that find itself facing a state-funded competitor.

As a power-user of Endnote, I have also been underwhelmed by Zotero capabilities – it could well be a truly powerful tool in the future, but for now, it remains rather anemic by comparison. The Zotero developers talk a good game, and can even show powerful results within narrow domains, but overall it’s still a weak alternative.

It’s worth stressing the importance of open vs. closed file formats. A lot of people in the free software community (of which I am not a part, btw) care more about open file formats than they care about free software per se.

Once your files are in open formats, it doesn’t matter what software created them. You, or the community surrounding you, can always develop new tools to manipulate the underlying data. That means that you can be confident that your data will be available for decades. With a proprietary file format, your access to your work is subject to the whims or incompetence of the company that created the file format.

In the case of your scholarly work, or the resources you rely on for that work, that is simply unacceptable.

There is no practical reason why the contents of all of the university libraries cannot be google-captured and accessed. Geographically chartered academic institutions are dead things waiting to fall over. That is why they are proceeding with “deliberate speed” to share the world’s knowledge. They dread the Phoenix paradigm, because they know that something entirely different will rise from the ashes of their ivy-covered real estate.

” … the Wikipedia article on reverse engineering, …”

Stop. Right. There.

“This random webpage, written maybe by some guy who I don’t know if he has any idea of what he’s talking about, says …”

This is why I think Wikipedia can be dangerous – yes, people make disclaimers, but then they go right ahead and do things they should not do. And then it’s displaced PEOPLE WHO DO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT!

See, e.g.

http://madisonian.net/2008/09/28/endnote-v-zotero/

[Sorry to be harsh, but this effect is something which bothers me a lot about Wikipedia]

Geographically chartered academic institutions are dead things waiting to fall over.
Oh come on, HH. Not in your lifetime, and probably not your grandchildren’s.

There is no practical reason why the contents of all of the university libraries cannot be google-captured and accessed. Geographically chartered academic institutions are dead things waiting to fall over. That is why they are proceeding with “deliberate speed” to share the world’s knowledge. They dread the Phoenix paradigm, because they know that something entirely different will rise from the ashes of their ivy-covered real estate.

Setting aside your speculation as to the future of universities, let me make a couple of observations:
1. Most large (or sufficiently funded) universities are moving as quickly as possible towards open information systems. A cursory glance at the OAI, DLF, or eduCause websites should make that pretty clear.

2. There are two principal obstacles to making “the contents of all of the university libraries” available to engines like Google: The high cost in money and time of digitization, and similar costs in tracking down copyright holders for collected texts. This is to say that there are mostly practical reasons that you can’t Google your way through all university collections, and almost no hypothetical reasons. Ask Microsoft about the expense of mass digitization of university collections.

This is pretty much exactly the reason I’ve avoided using EndNote and tools like it. Easier for me than many disciplines, as we don’t use Word as a rule. Burying my data in a proprietary format has always seemed at best short-sited, though.

Open data formats are so vastly superior for anything like this that I’ve so far happily forgone any (hopefully short lived) advantages software that relied on locking up the data might have.

Oh come on, HH. Not in your lifetime, and probably not your grandchildren’s.

Demonstrably false. Energy depletion alone will put an end to the jet-transport-enabled academic conference within 20 years and the cost of running a conventional physical campus will make tuition unaffordable for all but a tiny elite.

Wikipedia and Google have education revolution written all over them, but academics shun anything that endangers their precious campuses. It’s game over for the geographically chartered model of academia. All that remains is the recycling of the campuses into adult theme parks and historic sites.

HH: Wikipedia and Google have education revolution written all over them, but academics shun anything that endangers their precious campuses. It’s game over for the geographically chartered model of academia. All that remains is the recycling of the campuses into adult theme parks and historic sites.

I know! I mean, I was discussing this matter with some other academics in the Web 2.0 workshop I was teaching and we were discussing how google apps, zotero and blinklist were enabling us to share resources without geographic limitations. It’s like the University is just disappearing!

Get a grip, man. Just because your hedge fund is in the tank doesn’t mean the sky is falling. And just because the academic world is changing it doesn’t mean civilization is collapsing.

Isn’t it absurd to maintain that an educational facility built around its store of physical books would remain unaltered once those books are universally accessible and linked to all other university collections?

Good thing nobody’s ever said it would remain unaltered then. Funny how many academics work these days hardly ever visiting their campus libraries, yet somehow still find it very useful to be on campus, isn’t it?

In any case, it’s pretty absurd to assume at this point you can see clearly what all the alterations will be — history laughs at predictions like that.

The copyright problem, on the other hand, is real

Yes, and that is why the physical campus defenders will dig in and fight a rear-guard action against digitization and global access. The physical library is the nucleus of the geographically chartered university. Virtualize and aggregate the libraries and these institutions implode. You don’t need a PhD to figure this out.

So far, good idea or not, most of the technology shifts have effected putting more students through the campuses, not fewer.

It is a classic lag phenomenon. Textbook sales are increasing too, but does anyone see a future for the standard university textbook? The campus cult is going to price itself out of existence. Energy depletion alone will be enough to do it, but the competitive power of web-based advanced education will be what puts the campus cult out of business.
Young adults will figure out cheaper ways to fraternize and engage in substance abuse, I assure you.

Seth – I know you are down on Wikipedia – but my precise claim was that it may or may not be reliable, but is probably more reliable than someone (myself) who knows absolutely nothing about the topic. What’s your beef with that?

I actually find it more troubling that the thrust of the post is “I have no clue about this but I’m gonna come out with a call to boycott someone anyway.” I also find the idea that stealing someone’s property (if that’s what actually happened) and turning it into a superior product makes the enforcement of the original property right socially indefensible pretty indefensible itself.

The number I saw for Google digitization was $5/book (an amount that will surely continue to decline as the cost of the technology decreases). So scanning even millions of volumes is not a large sum for Google.

I’d be interested to see the cost breakdown you saw; from what I saw on campus, there’s no way the overall cost is $5 a book- but perhaps including the time spent scanning less delicate volumes when there were fewer possible duplicates, it averages out. I doubt that captures the cost of adding new books now.

Regardless, Google sees an advantage in scanning, and so we have Google in large academic libraries moving at the speed of Google digitizing. The expense of digitization is more than the libraries themselves can pay very quickly, but they’re happy to have someone else do it. The idea that the Ivory Tower is bottlenecking the digitization and propagation of library collections is a strawman. Google is already in the libraries; research is already increasingly collaborative and distributed; and libraries are incentivized (if not by outreach concerns, then by digital preservation) to open digital content up. It’s a university that created Zotero, for Pete’s sake.

How exactly do you see the various roles the university plays being met without any campuses in the near-medium term?

1. Global faculties organized by discipline.
2. Open enrollment by automated screening.
3. Study programs organized by student capabilities and goal set.
4. Matriculation determined by testable mastery, not duration of study.
5. Globally recognized mastery credentials and certifications.
6. Teaching and research appointments determined by testable mastery, not institutional credentials.

Modern industry would have been laughable if explained to a craft guild in the Middle Ages. Global networked higher education looks funny to the campus cult for similar reasons: it is an extinction threat.

But so far it seems that the pedagogical function of a university does not work as well without physical classrooms

A major problem in modern university classrooms is that students are communicating on the Internet while attending lectures (OMG! Can you believe what he just said?) Maybe these campus assembly areas can be converted into charm schools or religious retreats, but their role as learning facilities is over. $25,000 a semester to read fundamental texts and write 12 term papers? WTF? Is this how we will educate the children of 8 billion people?

Ah, ok, now I see you’re just confused about how complicated systems actually work. You’re holding up a cartoon future education system against the real world and finding the latter lacking. How surprising.

1. Global faculties organized by discipline.
2. Open enrollment by automated screening.
3. Study programs organized by student capabilities and goal set.
4. Matriculation determined by testable mastery, not duration of study.
5. Globally recognized mastery credentials and certifications.
6. Teaching and research appointments determined by testable mastery, not institutional credentials.

There is a place for (1), and they already exist. In some areas much more could be done — but if you overdo it, you get worse results. Cross disciplinary research and collaboration is very fruitful, but difficult to maintain. It gets worse if everyone turns inward. There is no sensible mechanism for (2) now or in near future. (3) is interesting — an old idea with mixed results in education. Mixed enough that it’s not an obvious improvement (4) is roughly speaking the current system, most places. Testing being imperfect, there is some amount of time served, sure. No technology exists to help this now or near future. Much more stringent test can be administered, but that has other problems (5) Is called `a degree’. There is room for quibbling about the details. Global recognition is hard, but somewhat negotiated this way. (6) again is (very) roughly the current system. Some things are not effectively testable, and some may be emphasized differently. But imaging there is a simple replacement that will somehow clean it up by `testing mastery’ is laughable.

None of what you say implies the dissolution of campuses. I actually agree with you that education and research are in the process of a big shape up facilitated by information technology. I just find your conclusions bizarre and wondered if there were anything interesting behind them. Seems not.

The physical library is the nucleus of the geographically chartered university. Virtualize and aggregate the libraries and these institutions implode.

I think you’ve forgotten science! Labs (for both teaching and research) aren’t going anywhere fast!

I think you’ve forgotten science! Labs (for both teaching and research) aren’t going anywhere fast!

I think you have forgotten that computers can run simulated experiments that are impossible in a physical lab, and can provide a degree of experimental control in simulated experiments that is far greater than what the lab provides. The experimental output of the new CERN accelerator will be processed by a “cloud” of over 100,000 Internet-linked computers. So just where is their “lab?”

Henry – my beef is not with the precise claim – which could always be made logically trivially true. But rather, pointing out this little example of the overall negative displacement effect Wikipedia has on real expertise. I mean, part of blog-evangelism is that there’s now a universe of experts available at your fingertips, eager to share their insights on a topic. I happen to know how intensely debated is the topic of reverse-engineering, having been somewhat personally affected. And where do you turn? Where do you POINT THE READERS? (a possibly significant effect, given CT’s prominence). To the notorious cult that has a real tendency to drive away scholars in favor of fanatical players of bureaucratic politics.

Again, I don’t mean to make too much of it in context. But the post is an example of a point I’ve been thinking about, in terms of a problem of the question “[When] should people use Wikipedia?”. There’s a standard answer, “Use it as one source among many”. But I’ve been thinking there’s a subtle but critically important problem with that answer, in that Wikipedia has a very dangerous tendency to draw attention from experts and funnel it into itself (Jaron Lanier touched on this in his critique). So the standard answer is too facile, and I’ve been trying to come up with a good way of explaining why that’s so.

Regarding Wikipedia, the transition from derision to fear didn’t take long, did it? What really outrages the Wikicritics is the astonishing span of knowledge assembled by the Wikirabble. It just doesn’t seem proper. There has never been anything remotely like Wikipedia, and it frightens conventional scholars – not because it is so big, but because it is so young.

I don’t want to hijack the thread, but e.g. read about the
Wikipedia “Essjay” scandal
(note who wrote that _Guardian_ column :-) )

note who wrote that Guardian column :-)

Wow, nice beard!

I don’t want to hijack the thread

There are other commenters with a modest efficiency advantage for that.

Contributing my two cents to the rather thorough derailment of this thread:

I think the main point of universities is the networks they build, not the education they provide. As such, “we can provide the same education more cheaply” is rather entirely beside the point.

I think the main point of universities is the networks they build, not the education they provide. As such, “we can provide the same education more cheaply” is rather entirely beside the point.

We can provide a better network more cheaply.

HH appears to believe that personal interaction contributes absolutely nothing to education. They are entitled to their opinions, of course, but not to have them taken as fact. Universities are quite interested in dispensing with expensive labor; students are less interested in having no one to talk to when they have a problem.

Scientific research is already international in scope, and you still benefit from personal interaction. You gain things from knocking on someone’s door. We have regular discussions about papers posted to the net. And we still write papers with folks all over the planet – in many cases with people we have never met.

If you go someplace like Harvard you get a shot at being taught by someone who is actually doing the research instead of someone who last encountered it in graduate school two decades ago. You get a chance to actually do research. And, of course, you make personal contacts that can serve you quite well later in life. (You can also get taught in some places by TAs and have professors who are talented researchers but incompetent teachers, or who checked out intellectually a decade ago. But that’s not a requirement.) That’s not going anyplace either.

its ability to convert – in direct violation of the License Agreement – Thomson’s 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files.”

A PDF of the complaint can be found here:
http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4051

With regard to wikipedia, I don’t think that it’s proper use is “one source among many”. Its proper use is to fulfill casual curiosity about items that you wouldn’t otherwise take the trouble to research. I use it that way all the time, and it’s tremendously convenient.

On the other hand, I’ve also watched climate scientists try to maintain wikipedia’s pages on global warming and the like, and yes, it’s a constant struggle against the right-wing know-nothings who have to be swatted down again and again. I don’t know if I’d call it “bureaucratic”; it’s like having to write a popular science article that’s continually interrupted by flamers who insist that their BS is just as valid as your science, and having to be civil while you gradually ease them out.

If social networking were going to make universities obsolete, wouldn’t company offices be going obsolete just as fast or faster? I mean, aside from the Stonecutters’ conspiracy to hold back the Segway, we would already be living in a world where people don’t go to the office, they just do all their work out of the house and interact using the internet, and maybe have meetings in the park on nice days. If you can learn organic chemistry or lit crit from teh Google, why not conduct corporate meetings that way? Or are you of the opinion that time spent in corporate meetings is mainly productive, unlike time spent in classrooms or professors’ offices?

Besides which, doesn’t HH have it backwards here? If universities were really the ones afraid of losing their monopoly on licensing expert knowledge to the corporate sector, wouldn’t they be resisting something like Zotero, instead of inventing it?

Besides which, doesn’t HH have it backwards here?

Yes. But it seems HH doesn’t know much about the history of this stuff. Universities have always been pushing it forward, formally and informally. The example of zotero as noted, but many others; facebook started off as social network for Harvard students. The web was invented by and for academic physicists, much of the internet infrastructure was created for similar reasons. While identifying that there exist people within academia distrusting of technology and it’s effects, HH simultaneously forgets to note that more than anywhere else, academic institutions and universities have housed not only the people who really “get it”, but the ones who invent it.

HH imagines a conspiracy of education `cultists’ vainly trying to stem the tide of educational progress about to wash over them. The truth is less romantic and more complicated. The top students (and HH misread me earlier on that, I didn’t mean this to stand in as students at elite schools, rather the top of any class) will learn regardless … most of the others only with a lot of hand holding. It’s true that there has been some success in commercial arenas mostly at distributing information, less so at teaching new skills, online. But web content and videos might handle the corporate briefings, but it doesn’t do well for anything very complicated. There the primary successes come from putting good instructors in small rooms of students (sound familiar?). Indeed, there is an industry built around this sort of teaching. And unsurprisingly this isn’t news, armed forces figured that out ages ago too.

One main thing (besides basically misunderstanding the role of universities and elite universities in particular) HH is wrong about here is that while there is going to be some built in conservatism (especially from older faculty) to these things, many of the biggest gains in introducing technology to education have come from the universities, and will continue to be in the forseeable future. It’s also the testing ground in which some pretty spectacular failures for technology can be found. Because after all, like the corporations and the military, universities figured out a long time ago that on average people learn best in smallish groups with personal interaction and some handholding.

>also find the idea that stealing someone’s property (if that’s what actually happened) and turning it into a superior product makes the enforcement of the original property right socially indefensible pretty indefensible itself.

Umm OK “stealing someone else’s property” is not what Zoltera is accused of. Not even copyright violation. They are accused of violating a contract (unmeritoriously as far as I can see – but I’m no lawyer.) Basically, by making their software able to read Endnote software, they are accuse of violating a contract as Endnote users of taking part of Endnote software. But file formats normally are not considered part of software in that sense. Everybody and his brother reads Microsoft formats. Microsoft imports hundreds of non-Micro-soft formats. Now the way Endnote tries to get around this is to claim reverse engineering of software (which thanks to really absurd copyright laws is now illegal). But we don’t really know that. The reverse engineering may be only of the data files, compare printouts or plain text of the data to the proprietary format. Again not a lawyer, but is sounds to me like this would only fall under that law if file formats are considered copyrighable. Most software on the market can import from at least one other file format. So that would be a hell of a precedent if so.

At any rate, even if it turns out that Endnote has a legal point, it appears largely to rest on a non-obvious interperation of an obsure clause in their contract. Calling that “theft” seems very over the top.

You really should understand why MIT did this. Much more so than providing a resource (very decent of them), it was in order to underline their extreme confidence that exactly they type of argument you are making was false. That is, that even if they give you all of the material for free, the expense and difficulty of actually attending MIT was worth every penny to their students.

You are making the absurd claim that MIT undertook the enormous task of making all of its courses freely accessible online to PROVE that an MIT education is worth every penny? By this illogic, the more powerful and extensive MIT’ s free offerings become, the more overwhelming is the case for attending MIT. Maybe you need to spend some more time with your uniquely effective university instructors.

You are bluntly denying the possibility of any effective alternative to conventional face-to-face university instruction. Since this is about to become uneconomic, you are effectively pronouncing a death sentence on higher education. Enjoy the glorious sunset.

The Essjay scandal just isn’t one, as far as I can see, except for Essjay and the New Yorker. People who use Wikipedia find out quickly that any yokel can edit it, so yeah, you take what you can get from it knowing that other sources might be better.

What Essjay contributions were wrong?

I’m surprised that my description of Wikipedia as a “notorious cult that has a real tendency to drive away scholars in favor of fanatical players of bureaucratic politics” is drawing such dispute – I thought, colorful phrasing aside, at heart that’s quite a prosaic observation, almost conventional wisdom among many nowadays. See for example:

https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/04/wikipedia/ , quoting

“For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War – and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge – get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.”

Regarding “But if bureaucratic pettymindedness, bitter and stupid arguments over trivialities etc invalidated knowledge production, …”

I didn’t say that. I do contend that large amounts of such politics HAVE A TENDENCY (note, not an absolute and categorical statement applying to every item, but a statistical aggregate assertion applying overall) to lower the quality by favoring game-players over expertise.

“I simply don’t see this as a zero sum game, which seems to be the underlying logic of your critique.”

But it is a zero-sum game. In your post, Wikipedia got the link, the Google-juice, the readership. An expert blogger (or better source) did not. Because of your action, Wikipedia got a little stronger versus identifiable experts. It’s a small matter individually, but in the aggregate, I think there’s very negative effect here. One which is under-examined in the standard punditry about using Wikipedia.

Which part? I’ve given links to arguments for both “notorious cult” and “drive away” (I’ve written a lot on the “cult” part, but again, I’m trying to avoid pulling it all into this thread). The point is not that those ideas are beyond dispute in any sense (everything is contestable, I know, I know), but rather the underlying concepts are in fact rather standard fare in certain circles.

On Zotero’s development:
More likely, it was developed by undergraduates earning just over minimum wage at work-study jobs, and by a guy who did a senior thesis on the .ens format.
I find this extremely unlikely. Not so much because zotero actually works, on multiple platforms, but because it’s usable, intuitive and easy to pick up. That stuff doesn’t happen by accident.

Damned if I didn’t think that personal interaction is occurring here on CT, but it just shows how easily fooled I am.
I apologise for continuing a dead topic, but I’d like to draw a line between personal interaction and flamewars. This is a civil one, but it still doesn’t approach anything like a serious conversation with a considered exchange of views. I’m not saying thoughtful conversations are impossible online, but they seem largely incompatible with the kind of aggressively open structure HH appears to favour.

Future comments on this topic will be deleted summarily.

But why stop there, Henry? Why not declare that nothing of substance can be discussed on CT because it is a mere blog, necessarily subservient to the hallowed precincts in which serious matters can be properly considered.

That is, either I get people mad at me for hobbyhorsing, or you claim I haven’t proved my point.

Can I ask you then for your knockout blow of anti-Wikipedia linkage? Doesn’t have to be in this thread. I am honestly interested.

Henry, your reply is deeply flawed on two counts:
1) It’s shifting the point – it’s like saying unless a factory actually lose money, it doesn’t matter how inefficient it is.
2) Wikipedia may or may not be malign overall, that’s a different topic, but it’s entirely possible that your specific action can do more harm than good to knowledge production (i.e. if it does a relatively large harm in discouraging topic experts, that can far outweigh the relatively small benefit of promoting a barely passable article) – disclaimer, again, this specific post is simply a minor example of an overall trend.

Regarding “would suggest that academia itself is a zero sum game, with its emphasis on citations etc”

Umm, how many times have you heard complaints that superstars within a field get citations that are very generic, at the expense of better work done by less prominent researchers? My overall point is not that the problems have never been seen before, but rather are made worse in some fairly subtle ways.

Now, I’m aware that evangelism has spawned counter-evangelism, i.e. Andrew Keen, where each side makes hay by knocking down the other’s strawmen. I’m not doing reflexive denial. But I do think that there are substantial negatives that should be better examined.

[FYI, I’m planning a future column on examining some of complexities in the “Internet” knowledge production argument, based on Tim Berner-Lee’s recent remarks, going into some counter-intuitive aspects]

1) It’s shifting the point – it’s like saying unless a factory actually lose money, it doesn’t matter how inefficient it is.

It’s not like that for me as a user, because it’s free. If a factory produces 25% worthwhile frisbees and 75% worthwhile ones and they give them to me for nothing, I’m okay with their inefficiency. Unless the frisbees are explosive (which may analogize to various biographical hijinks on Wikipedia or maybe vaccine/autism linkages).

Thanks for the links though. I guess what I have a problem with in your arguments is that the process and the backing is taken issue with, which is fine as they should be criticized, whereas the overall product hasn’t really been scratched, as it’s pretty common knowledge that you should take the Wikipedia with a grain of salt.

Why has this important discussion been hijacked by a stale and repetitive discussion about Wikipedia.

The important discussion is about the domination the Thomson Reuters has over academic life without any mandate apart from corporate power. The decisions about what journals get listed in ISI are critical: they control what counts for tenure and promotion (or are just visible to the rest of the community).

The academic community seems content to allow Thomson Reuters hegemony over this. This has always worried me but this bullying of Zotero raises my concern greatly (and I say this as someone who finds EndNote works reliably and efficiently and has not deefected to Zotero (admittedly if I had to buy it myself I might have a different view).

T-R hold a dangerous and, until Zotero, uncontested monopoly on bibliographic software (having bought up all the competing products) and a treatening postion as gatekeepers to knowledge.

@Righteous Bubba

No–not really. The complaint regards the undocumented file format used for formatting citations specifically, not for data exchange between literature databases and desktop reference managers.

Most of the programs in your search can do the latter, but not the former.

It seems to me that EndNote, like any other proprietary software, is a social problem, and this demonstrates it very well. This kind of abuse is exactly what government money should be working to create free replacements for.

Why has this important discussion been hijacked by a stale and repetitive discussion about Wikipedia.

For all of the usual, tedious, reasons I expect.

I’ve wondered before why BibTeX never found much of a home outside the LaTeX world. It’s a reasonable text based format for this sort of information. Chicken-and-egg problem? (by which I mean the lack of tools outside of La/BibTex to manage them). But being textually based, such tools are reasonably easy to produce (at least, rudimentary ones) but I haven’t seen much evidence of it.

Mike C: My thoughts exactly. I came across this post with some hope of seeing a bit of agitation on an issue that sorely that needs it. The diversion of public money, intended for education, towards tax-farmers like Thomson is a scandal, but I guess it’s of less interest to contributors here than the burning question of whether or not they approve of Wikipedia. So it goes.

HH @95,

would you ever catch a clue and feck off? I mean, if you want to help the University of Phoenix (or whatever that enterprise calls itself) drive the final stake through the heart of the undead dinosaur that is traditional academe, surely you have more important things to do with your time than bore us hopeless myopics to tears.

[something that is almost, but not quite, completely unlike wit]

[They LAUGHED at me, the fools, with their ‘science’ and their ‘book learning.’ Now they shall LEARN what it is like to feel the FULL AND RIGHTEOUS WRATH OF MAGNETO]

You dare SNEER at and DISPARAGE my messages, do you?? You will SOON LEARN, to your great and lasting regret, the infinite power of the WRATH OF MAGNETO!!

@The Raven,

As above, the fight isn’t against the machine-readable data exchange file formats, but against the files that describe citation styles that end up in human-readable documents.

I am become GALACTUS, DESTROYER OF BLOGS!!!

I’ve been following this law suit. It’s ironic that just today, I recevied an email from Thomson Reuters requesting that I participate in market research.

I wrote up a post about it urging academic who receive this email to NOT PARTICIPATE.

http://www.andrewcullison.com/2008/10/thomson-reuters-market-research/

If you receive the same email I did, maybe you could voice your concerns about the law suit.

You will all be ASHES, ASHES in the conflagration from which my glorious NEW PHOENIX will arise.

Watson Aname is right about bibtex and internationalisation, except to suggest that LaTeX is stuck in a pre-utf8 world. LaTeX is doing really quite well (as are the etex/pdfetex engines behind it) at dealing with non-ascii nowadays (and there are experimental backends that are even better). The difficulty is the bibtex engine (version 1.0 is expected in 1989) which hasn’t kept up and needs {\’e} for é and so on, and is insofar inconsistent with LaTeX. That’ll change too — there is at least one project to re-write it from scratch.

Just to footnote the Wikipedia digression: Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden write well about some of its problems, with specifics and good exposition: Teresa on the loss of clarity that comes from trying too encyclopedia-ish, Teresa on utterly missing the point about the proper tone for some subjects, and Patrick on a determined homophobe’s gaming of the administrative system, among others. The comment threads are also loaded with worthwhile stuff (and cruft, but hey, welcome to conversation).

As for the actual topic, geez, that’s some vile stuff. And I very much approve of the idea of just plain steering away from Thomson-Reuters products. Some years back I realized that whole categories of ethical questions that seemed very tangled and difficult were so because they’d been put in terms like “What can we get with?” and “How disgusting can this get before we really ought to do something about it?” Shifting attention to questions like “What can we do right now to make this better?” and “What should we be shooting for to make this as good as it can be?” is very often more rewarding in both short and long terms. It certainly seems like, even though Zotero doesn’t yet do everything a user might wish for, it’s heading in a good direction with much better means. So it’s a good choice.

Sorry to sidetrack from the singularity, but surely there’s precedent for this. I find it impossible to believe that nobody has sued over converting a proprietary format before, and I find it fairly hard to believe there are no IP lawyers on CT. So surely someone knows whether Thomson-Reuters has a case or not.

Disclosure: Thomson-Reuters are the primary competitors of my employer.

Out in layman-land everybody thinks you have to have Adobe© to read or write pdf’s, though this is in fact not the case, though it is very much in Adobe©’s interest to allow that tacit fiction to persist.
Also JSTOR, a wannabe evil empire of academic and just plain useful information held inaccessible, bottlenecked under licensed-and-paid-for controlled access.
JSTOR passing unnoticed in its perfidy by many if not most academics, because their institutions provide them with free access.
It is the rest of us who suffer under these venal restrictions, as so often we do.

I have no time for any mocking of the “down with metallica” theory.

Metallica made a lot of money and fame in the 80s producing a video (cliff ’em all – look it up) using bootlegged material they obtained from their fans. Now they are famous and making lots of money they want to stop their fans bootlegging music.

Metallica made their fame and their reputation from fans copying music – recording them in small backyard concerts, taping them in the larger gigs, sharing tapes around their friends and playing them in their homes and offices and cars. Metallica completely depended on open sharing of their copyrighted stuff. They never complained when they were on the up and up thanks to their fans’ glib approach to copyright issues. Now they are rich as buggery they want to stand on their rights? This is bullshit. They openly admitted in their early days that this was the model by which they gained fame.

There may be some validity to the use of copyright to protect artists’ income, but I notice that a lot of bands are pretty happy about having their music shared around when they first start and I think that there’s two sides to the story, and only one side being heard… so yeah, down with metallica, they’ ve sold out, it’s a knife in the back of the fans, etc. etc. gee aren’t I a cliche! Also, the money I paid to watch that great scene in Cliff ’em all where they play Master of Puppets against a wall of wind and sound? Can I have my money back? Didn’t think so…

anonynonymouse: “Yet to be prominently heard on this website is the voice of anyone who has ever produced and then sold anything for a living.” Like you? Sure you have.

Metallica completely depended on open sharing of their copyrighted stuff. They never complained when they were on the up and up thanks to their fans’ glib approach to copyright issues. Now they are rich as buggery they want to stand on their rights? This is bullshit. They openly admitted in their early days that this was the model by which they gained fame.

Interesting. Apparently their “fans’ glib approach to copyright issues” made them “rich as buggery”?

GMU is being sued for violating a license agreement.

Like I said, I am not all that interested in the merits of this particular claim. It may or may not be legitimate; few above here have been concerned about the details either. They have suggested that Thomson has no right to enforce its copyright/contract terms because doing so is inherently wrong. I just can’t agree with the general point of view. Look at the stories of actors, writers, etc. whose careers were basically made through one television show for which the rights were poorly contracted. I *do* think that the actors on Gilligan’s Island, e.g., deserve payment when that program is broadcast. Yep, they deserve to be “rich,” or something close to it. Certainly not bankrupt, which is pretty much how things work out these days. Stripping away creators’ rights isn’t going to help that at all.

They have suggested that Thomson has no right to enforce its copyright/contract terms because doing so is inherently wrong.

It’s fun to slide copyright in there but it really didn’t have anything to do with the thread until you showed up and misunderstood everything.

That’s what I said, anonynonymouse. Metallica made – and sold – a whole video produced entirely from bootlegged material which was volunteered to them by their fans. Between the album Kill ’em all in 1982(?) and the release of And justice for all in 1989 this was the only video they ever made or released. They never received radio airplay or support in the popular press, they were completely untouched by payola or any of the major marketing tools. Their fame and success arose from steadily building up a strong fan base, through live performances and word of mouth. When me and my friends were listening to Metallica in my dusty smelting town back in the late ’80s, we had maybe 4 original albums between us. It was share and share alike. This loyal fan base no doubt paid off big time for Metallica when we got our first full-time jobs, and they know it.

This isn’t the only band that built up its success on this model. Midnight Oil spring to mind as another excellent example. It’s really rank to see these bands getting all hoity toity about their copyright now that they’re rolling in money.

We spent our childhoods ripping off their albums, but they’re richer by far than any of us. Doesn’t seem to me they have been very badly harmed by our activities. They should be thanking us for our loyalty, not pursuing a new generation of fans who’re just doing the same thing.