Third, here too, when developing the idea, the defendants referred in their article to various sources, including an article by the plaintiff together with defendant 2 from 2021 (No. 37 in the list of sources in the article):
"Further motivation and support for developing this conclusion is provided by Bashan and Kordova [37] who provide an initial foundation for evaluating and implementing a system approach to quality management in global organization by introducing a Systems Thinking"
Bashan A., Kordova S. (2021). Globalizaion, Quality and System Thinking: Integrating Global Quality Management and a Systems view, Heliyon, 7, doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e06161
- Thus, a perusal of the examples chosen by the plaintiffs themselves from the lengthy opinions they attached, and even of another central issue mentioned in the opinion above, shows that they do not have a single point of similarity to the way of expressing an idea protected by copyright. Therefore, as explained above, the plaintiffs did not meet the initial burden required of them to prove that a work was copied in violation of the Copyright Law.
It should be noted that the search for similarities does not require a "word-for-word" identity, especially when the claim is of disguised copying. However, a prerequisite is that the plaintiffs will point to a way of expressing an idea in the plaintiff's research that may be protected by copyright, which has found its way - even if in a different verbal formulation that disguises the source - into the defendants' article. In the absence of a vote on one protected element in the plaintiffs' work that is not merely an idea, and in the absence of a vote on a protected element in the defendants' article that also exceeds the scope of an idea, copyright infringement is not proven.
I will add that the plaintiffs did not argue, and in any case did not show that this was a combination of ideas that may, in exceptional circumstances, establish a copyright. In our case, as stated, we are dealing with 2-3 general ideas that were written mainly in the literary review chapter of the defendants' article, with reference to literary sources (including the plaintiff's), and most of which were already mentioned in the research proposal and in the presentation of the pilot study before transferring articles 8 and 9 to Dr. Cordova. Therefore, even this exception does not exist in our case.