At the same time, the plaintiffs' conduct on this issue raises questions. The very presentation of pages from a book, which are presented as the same book from 2014, when only in retrospect after it is discovered that the pages do not appear in it is a claim for the 2017 edition, raises a great difficulty. It is not impossible that if I had been required to decide this, and the decision had been the duty of the plaintiffs, this alone would have been sufficient to dismiss the claim as a whole (see the judgment of the Honorable Justice Stein Other Municipal Applications 765/18 Hayoun v. Hayun [Nevo] (May 1, 2019)).
Conclusion
- The plaintiffs' argument is that the defendants took the innovative products of the plaintiff's research, and presented them, disguised as their findings and conclusions. The plaintiffs were therefore obliged to show what is the "innovative product" in their research, which constitutes a way of expressing an idea that is protected by copyright, and where in the article the defendants appropriated the same product for themselves and presented it as their own. In the examples presented in the plaintiffs' summaries, there is not a single example of an innovative product of the plaintiff, which exceeds the boundaries of a mere idea. In fact, there is not even a single example of a product in the defendants' article that deviates from the boundaries of an idea.
Therefore, and given that a combination of the plaintiff's original ideas was also not proven, the plaintiffs did not prove that the plaintiff's copyright was infringed in the defendants' article.
- This is a relatively complex legal proceeding, which required considerable resources, inter alia in view of the need to delve into the depths of 4 opinions spread over many hundreds of pages and more, and professional articles (in a foreign language) that are understandable to researchers in the field of quality management but are not within the framework of the court's judicial knowledge. Not only that, but various questions were raised that remained unexplained by the plaintiffs, such as regarding the 2017 edition of the plaintiff's book. Even the very fact of falsely accusing academic researchers of copying (an accusation that also caused a delay in the publication of the article, even though it was not granted by a temporary order) carries with it severity that must be taken into account in the framework of expenses.
The defendants did not attach evidence of their legal expenses on attorney's fees, and in these circumstances, taking into account the amount of the claim, the result I reached and the aforesaid, I found them to be in the total amount of ILS 50,000.