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Originally Posted by latepaul
IANAL but my guess would be that whilst his TOC is technically copyright - it's an expression in fixed form after all - that won't be enough to stop someone else writing a book with the same structure.
He also seems to have fallen into the trap of thinking it's the idea that's valuable and not the execution. This strikes me as similar to the folks who think that if they wrote a book about a boy wizard going to wizarding school prior to 1997 that they can sue JK Rowling. Aside from the legal niceties there's an assumption that it was those elements (the idea) that accounts for the success and not the book itself as a whole.
Similarly if someone else writes a maritime history with the same structure as your friend it won't be that that makes or breaks its success, it'll be the quality of the writing, of the research, the interest in the subject matter itself.
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For that matter what about the "Worst Witch" stories? They started in 1974 and feature things like a kindly headmistress, a grumpy potions teacher, etc. and seeing some of the episodes of the series on netflix I can see similarities between it and the Harry Potter books, but one isn't a copy of the other. Enough details are different to make them totally different in the telling. Or there is "High Noon" and "Outland" as another example. Both use the same premise of a lawman left alone to deal with a problem but are different. Or "Romeo and Juliet" and "West Side Story." Similar ideas but different stories. The world is chock full of similar but different stories. In fact since most books follow the same basic plot (where the hero wins at the end) I can't think of two stories that don't have some similarities between them.