Legal Commentary

Someone Needs a New Lawyer?

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

In Thomson Reuters: The Gang That Couldn’t Sue Straight, James Grimmelmann does a takedown on the (seemingly) asinine Thompson Reuters complaint against GMU (!) about a faculty member’s distribution of (widely available) free open source firefox plugin Zotero.

(I’m partial to the less powerful but very useful Scrapbook myself, but that’s mostly habit.)

That said, it does seem to me that there is one interesting and potentially triable (i.e. not utterly out-to-lunch) issue in the case, and that is the extent to which a contract by a firm with a (state) university can bind its professors. Let’s say that the contract at issue does prohibit GMU from distributing software like Zotero (not obvious it does, but bear with me). Does that prohibition bind the GMU faculty? I’m not sure; but to the extent the acts were within the scope of employment, it might. But of course it doesn’t bind either James or me, since we’re not parties.

And, as James points out, even if it does there’s the little question of what sort of damages would be owing. Since the claim is contractual, there’s no scope for tort damages, just contract damages, and it’s hard to see how those would be measurable here — in which case the courts would usually count them as zero.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on September 28, 2008 (boomark / email).