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.

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.

Indeed. While in this case it seems that CPBR is clearly at fault, the quoted copyright notice is equally clearly incorrect: it is quite easy to reword someone's ideas in a way that would be considered plagiarism if presented academically but falls under fair use.

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.)

>(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.

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

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.