I'm guessing these slimy money-grabbers are looking for names to match against their product registration database, so they can sue their own paying customers.

I spent a minute on Google and found a bunch of .ens files on their own website without having to agree to any click-wrap EULA at all. I wonder how they'd stop a "drive-by documentation" of their file format...

Sigh, another instance of the lawsuit business model.

I guess they're all moderately hilarious at first. Seeing their users flocking to open source competition, Thomson Reuters looked at their product and decided that the only remaining proprietary edge their product has is in the style files--not the ability to format citations in various styles, but the catalog of styles themselves.

At that point the sane thing to do is to admit there's no business model here and move on. Instead they chose to go after their customers with an axe.

Legally I don't really care if Thomson Reuters has the right to prevent their customers from, you know, using the information that's trapped in their product in a way that's valuable to them. The company paid for that data to be gathered, and all the customers accepted the boorish terms of use. So, fine. Caveat emptor.

But as strategy I really don't get it. The styles themselves are not secrets. Zotero ships with a lot of styles anyway. It's not like Thomson Reuters can, by being sufficiently evil, stop Zotero from having this information.

Is reverse engineering the same thing as hacking now?

I got the same e-mail. There was a minor discussion surrounding it on FriendFeed yesterday.

I can think of several things they might want to do with this information. I'm not saying any of them are really good ideas, but there are various possibilities of things they might want to do with those data.