

Plagiarism spat over scientific poster prep advice escalates to legal threats - tokenadult
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/plagiarism-spat-over-scientific-poster-prep-advice-escalates-to-legal-threats/

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jrockway
Interesting. On the one hand, brief quotes are fair use. Using someone's ideas
isn't even covered by copyright law. So I think it's the author that's being a
bit heavy-handed, but on the other hand, I probably wouldn't retain the
services of a lawyer to keep Appendix 5 of some brochure nobody reads -- it's
definitely possible that the consortium copied a bit too much of the work,
turning it from fair use to copyright infringement.

One thing's for sure: there will be two winners in this case. And it won't be
the author or the consortium.

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neurotech1
Plagiarism isn't necessarily a copyright violation. "Borrowing" ideas in
academic publications can become plagiarism at some point. Commercial
"copying" has different rules than in academia.

In the post, it looks like CPBR copied large blocks of text, then accused the
original author of copying them.

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jrockway
Ah, I assumed CPBR replied with a DMCA counternotice. Claiming they wrote the
text is probably not going to end well for them.

(I just realized: isn't this article guilty of exactly what the author thinks
is wrong? _That_ should be fun to watch.)

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shardling
>(I just realized: isn't this article guilty of exactly what the author thinks
is wrong? That should be fun to watch.)

Well, no? You and the earlier posts missed this:

>Many other passages of equivalent similarity appear throughout the two
documents. Indeed, side-by-side comparison of his 2004 document with CPBR’s
2012 version shows the texts to be virtually identical.

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jrockway
I meant the author of the original guide, who thinks that "using my ideas" is
copyright infringement.

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shardling
That statement doesn't appear in the linked article. He says that copying his
ideas is _plagiarism_ , which is something different. And in this particular
case he is suing over copyright infringement.

