Colin Purrington has developed something of a niche in the research world. While teaching evolutionary biology at Swarthmore College, Purrington began developing a how-to manual for putting together poster presentations for meetings — a pursuit that has earned him a little money and some attention.

The result is a website, Designing conference posters, that, by his reckoning, has received some 2 million hits over the years (actually, there was a previous iteration of the site called “Advice on designing scientific posters”).

Not surprisingly, Purrington, who has copyrighted the material on his site, likes to protect his intellectual property. According to Purrington‘s site:

Contents copyright Colin Purrington (1997-2013). Plagiarizing, adapting, and hosting elsewhere prohibited. Included in the plagiarizing prohibition is (1) paraphrase plagiarism, which is when you copy sentences and phrases but make minor word changes to mask your theft, and (2) idea plagiarism, which is when you present an idea as your own when in fact you found it here. Also, I have lost my patience with people claiming that Fair Use allows them to bypass my copyright, so don’t even think about it.

As he states, he frequently finds his words floating around the Internet, and, most of the time, quickly is able to get the offenders to take down the text. But not always.

Several weeks ago, Purrington found substantial passages of his text — he claims — in the appendix of a document from a group called the Consortium for Plant Biotechnology Research, Inc., a Georgia-based mix of industry and academia that doles out federal research money to biotech scientists. The section, Appendix 5, appears near the end of a lengthy document about an annual grant competition and is meant to offer friendly advice about how to create a successful poster for the group’s annual symposium, which will:

provide university scientists with the opportunity to meet industry scientists and to attract matching fund commitments.

The three-page document (these are in the 2011 version) includes many helpful hints, such as:

The number one mistake is to make your poster too long. Densely packed, high word-count posters are basically manuscripts pasted onto a wall, and attract only those viewers who are for some reason excited by manuscripts pasted onto walls.

And:

When using acronyms and numbers (e.g., ATP, 42) within the body of text, scale down the font size by a couple of points so that their sizes don’t overpower the lowercase text, which they would do if you leave them at the default size. Use of “small caps” will sometimes do the trick, but this effect varies with different fonts.

Which, to Purrington, had the ring of the familiar. Here’s what he’d posted, while still at Swarthmore, in 2004 (more on why that’s important in a moment):

The number one mistake is to make your poster too long. Densely packed, high word-count posters are basically manuscripts pasted onto a wall, and attract only those viewers who are for some reason excited by manuscripts pasted onto walls.

And:

When using acronyms and numbers (e.g., ATP, 666 — Purrington says he used to have the number 42 there but changed it. “Satan made me do it, no doubt”) within the body of text, scale down the font size by a couple of points so that their sizes don’t overpower the lowercase text, which they would do if you left them at the default size. Use of “small caps” will sometimes do the trick, but this effect varies with different software.

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.

Thinking it was a simple matter, Purrington fired off a takedown request to Purdue University, a consortium member, where he’d found the text, and waited for satisfaction. Purdue complied quickly. But Purrington was stunned when, not long after, he received a packet of material from the whitest of white-shoe Washington lawfirms, Arnold & Porter, accusing him of violating CPBR’s copyright! Turnabout is fair play, we suppose.

The impressively threatening missive — here’s the PDF — instructs Purrington to cease and desist his unlawful breach of CPBR’s copyright, else severe penalties shall ensue. (In other words, CPBR says Purrington isn’t a poster master but a … wait for it … im-poster.)

We have retained copies of your unlawful copies to preserve as evidence. Your actions constitute copyright infringement in violation of United States copyright laws. Under 17 U.S.C. 504, the consequences of copyright infringement include damages of between $750 and $30,000 per work, at the discretion of the court, and damages of up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. If you continue to engage in copyright infringement after receiving this letter, your actions will be evidence of “willful infringement.”

It also expresses a sensitivity unique to menacing lawyer letters, when it confesses to have been deeply troubled by Purrington’s desire, expressed in his cheeky takedown letter, to have “the head” of the person who allegedly violated his copyright. (To be fair, Purrington tells us he offered to pay for shipping, “which can be considerable for human body parts.”)

This language was interpreted by CPBR’s staff as a physical threat against their personal safety. Should you make any further similar threats, CPBR staff will have no choice by to contact authorities to protect themselves.

Despite the legal elephant gun here, Purrington insists he has primacy in the case.

CPBR claims it drafted its version in 2005. I wrote mine starting in 1997! The archive has many versions of my site before they even had a draft, so I could not have copied them.

Purrington, who says he will be retaining the Philadelphia firm of Pepper Hamilton for his defense, has posted his own list of demands:

Personally, I’d like (1) a check from them that fully covers my legal costs, (2) a written apology from the CEO that is posted on their home page for 1 year, (3) a message emailed to all past proposal applicants and research directors stating that Appendix 5 was plagiarized from my site, and (4) an all-expense paid trip to St Simons Island, Georgia [where CPBR is based] for me and my family, to compensate us for the pain and suffering that their bullying has caused. And about that last one — we better end up having a damn good time on St Simons Island. No poison in the soup, or anything like that! Or maybe (5) $150,000 in damages, for each of the years that they infringed upon my copyright?? Oh, and (6) it goes without saying that they can never, ever use my material in the future…so if you are on their mailing list and get the next announcement, please send me a copy if you see my text in Appendix 5 again (I’ll send you cookies if you’re the first!). Finally, (8) I think it would be good to have the plagiarizer fired — that amount of plagiarizing in college would get you expelled for a semester, and is equally inexcusable in the private sector…there should be consequences.

Calls for heads on platters are notably absent.

We attempted to reach David Metzger, the A&P lawyer representing CPBR — and, evidently, a go-to guy when your government contract is in jeopardy — multiple times but did not hear back from him. We also asked the consortium to comment but a representative did not respond.

Although we’ve tried not to take a position in his case — although we do know what it’s like to have someone steal our content and then say we’re plagiarizing them — we will say that we’re troubled by the heavy-handed approach here. Setting aside the question of who has true ownership of the words and ideas, is it really necessary to involve the services of an expensive attorney, who probably billed his client some bucks simply to ignore our two voice mail messages, to work this thing out?

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