Tuesday, June 1, 2010

“Medical Justice” promotes legally and ethically suspect doctor-patient copyright agreement


There is an excellent article on the ongoing battle between companies and consumers over online criticism, the article noted the following:
The group Medical Justice, which helps protect doctors from meritless malpractice suits, advises its members to have patients sign an agreement that gives the doctor copyright over a Web posting if the patient mentions the doctor or practice.

Dr. Jeffrey Segal, chief executive of Medical Justice, said about half of the group’s 2,500 members use the agreement.

“I, like everyone else, like to hear two sides of the story,” he said. “The problem is that physicians are foreclosed from ever responding because of state and federal privacy laws. In the rare circumstance that a posting is false, fictional or fraudulent, the doctor now has the tool to get that post taken down.”
This so-called “agreement” strikes me as both legally and ethically suspect. Not only does copyright law generally require written assignments of copyright to be for some kind of payment (what is the payment here? The medical treatment? I thought that was what health insurance and co-pays were for?) but unless it is a work-for hire or some other kind of ongoing employment relationship, you generally can’t force people to assign their copyright in a web posting before it is written, also in my opinion they should ask the paitiont before share the information with the other may be they do not want their information share with other parties this ia their privacy rights ,do you agree?

http://cyberlawcases.com/category/contract/

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