Investment of labor is not a guarantee of return. The fact that somebody put in a lot of hard work does not mean they should be unquestioningly handed a monopoly on the results of that work — especially when the results can be shared at zero cost, as is possible on the Internet.

The traditional justification for handing out that monopoly is not a moral one (i.e., not “Someone worked hard so they should get paid!”) but rather a systemic one: if we don’t hand them that monopoly now, then others may be less motivated to do similar work in the future.

That’s an interesting idea, but it’s also testable, and so far it’s not looking like it really holds up. Which makes sense, considering that these monopolies (copyrights, that is) were originally invented not because of the systemic motivation described above, but for an entirely different reason: to subsidize the up-front costs of distribution in the pre-Internet era. We’ve romanticized the history a lot since then, which is probably one reason the word “steal” is often used even though “copy” or “compatibly match an interface” would be more correct.

Thomson Reuter needs to find a business model that doesn’t rely on restricting other parties from constructing compatibility interfaces, that’s all. If they don’t find such a business model, then they’ll go out of business. This is what I would expect to happen to me if I ran a business based on faulty assumptions about my ability to restrict what others do, and there’s no reason that shouldn’t hold true for TR or anyone else as well.

(They might argue that the rules have been changed on them in the middle of the game, and to some degree that’s true… But the Internet is hardly news at this point, and the rules changed for everyone else too. You can’t sue the future.)

There are two issues here. First, there is the question of the legal (and, as you wish to explore, ethical) issue around the ability to read Endnote style files. I really don’t think there is any basis to argue this either legally or ethically wrong, any more than it would be to say its wrong for any word-processor other that Microsoft Word to read .doc and .dot files. To allow a company to claim ownership in this way would be clearly anti-competitive, and anti-consumer. TR has no leg to stand on.

The second is about the copyright issues that relate to particular file instances. I really don’t want to get into a huge discussion about this because it’s irrelevant here. TR has made claims here which are demonstrably false; Zotero does NOT distribute Endnote-derived style files. All CSL files in existence have been created entirely independently of Endnote.

So my point here is these two issues are completely orthogonal, both legally and ethically, but that you seem to be collapsing them in an unhelpful way.

The decision was:

[not to] actually convert styles due to copyright concerns

Zotero development takes place in public, so it is trivial to see that at least some of the Thomson Reuters claims are false.

This changeset add support for the undocumented EndNote style files. After a long discussion, it was decided

Thank you for the heads up on the Sakai list.