Quote Originally Posted by Adam L View Post
This is not a matter of academic, technical or military standards. It is an issue of this nation's copryright laws. Nagl stated, "This is not the academic way, but soldiers are not academics; it is my understanding that this longstanding practice in doctrine writing is well within the provisions of “fair use” copyright law." ("Desperat People with Limited Skills") This may be his understanding, but if he did take it upon himself to find out if this is in fact true and had cited his legal sources (or military guidelines pertaining to such) it would have ended the issue.

Adam
For starters, I don't think Price was motivated by his concern for copyright laws.

Second, I think that is a red herring: if copyright laws have been violated (and I don't know that they have), adding a citation doesn't change it. As someone else pointed out, ideas aren't copyrighted, words are. I don't believe that the manual includes enough verbatim use of copyright material to constitute a legal violation. I would strongly suspect that it was scrubbed by lawyers at some point before publication.

Again, keep in mind that John is giving his personal opinion in the statements you quoted.