It is quite possible that if the plaintiffs had met the burden of pointing out a number of similarities of copyrighted components (i.e., they are not merely an idea) - the burden of bringing the evidence to show that it was not copying would have been transferred to the defendants, and in such a case their failure to cross-examine the experts might have been a nuisance to them.
However, given that the examples presented in the plaintiffs' summaries, which are supposed to be the most significant, do not indicate a single protected element in the plaintiff's studies found in the defendants' article that deviates from the scope of a general idea (or even a combination of unprotected ideas), the conclusion that follows from this is that the plaintiffs did not meet the initial burden of proof. In such a situation, even in the absence of cross-examination by the experts, the claim should be dismissed.
- We will now examine the concrete examples brought by the plaintiffs in their summaries (in section 25.9) in their order. The plaintiffs began with examples from the table of expert opinions of Vaknin, an expert in the fields of quality management and information systems, and focused (rightly) on what he wrote regarding the similarity between articles 8 and 9 and the defendants' article.
- The first element in the table in the Vaknin opinion that was presented in the summaries is "Adoption of the Process Approach". This is not detailed in the summaries, but the clear intention is to adopt this approach (which deals with the analysis of activities as integrated processes that function as a coherent system - clause 2.1 of the defendants' article) in the quality management of global organizations and multinational companies.
However, first of all, as can be easily seen, the statement about the need to adopt a certain kind of approach in order to analyze a phenomenon is clearly a mere idea, and not a way of expressing it. It is similar to the author of a legal article proposing to adopt the economic approach in the analysis of copyright law, or the approach of behavioral psychology in the analysis of contract law. This is a general idea, and the first person who proposed it came up with an innovative idea, but from here to the granting of copyright in the idea - there is a long way to go. Granting copyright to an idea such as this means that after the first researcher comes up with the idea, no other researcher will be able to continue to develop and implement the approach to analyzing the phenomenon, in a way that will severely harm the development of academic knowledge.