Copyright Claim Sets Back Cognitive Impairment Testing 116
Kilrah_il writes "A recent New England Journal of Medicine editorial talks about the mini-mental state examination — a standardized screening test for cognitive impairment. After years of being widely used, the original authors claim to own copyright on the test and 'a licensed version of the MMSE can now be purchased [...] for $1.23 per test. The MMSE form is gradually disappearing from textbooks, Web sites, and clinical tool kits.' The article goes on to describe the working of copyright law and various alternative licenses, including GNU Free Documentation License, and ends with the following suggestion: 'We suggest that authors of widely used clinical tools provide explicit permissive licensing, ideally with a form of copyleft. Any new tool developed with public funds should be required to use a copyleft or similar license to guarantee the freedom to distribute and improve it, similar to the requirement for open-access publication of research funded by the National Institutes of Health.'"
Public Funds (Score:5, Insightful)
Any new tool developed with public funds should be entered into the public domain.
FTFY
So change the test, duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
So... Rewrite the damned test. Use different math problems, different spatial problems, different linguistic problems, which gets around the copyright issue entirely but still fundamentally measures the same underlying capacity.
17+34 doesn't magically measure basic math ability "better" than 15+29 just because Folstein, Folstein, and McHugh blessed it.
They did. Didn't help. (Score:5, Insightful)
The authors did. That didn't help them against the infringement claims of the corporation which benefits from an older test.
This is one example why many believe copyright does on the whole more damage than benefit to society.
Corporation, not authors (Score:4, Insightful)
The corporation, PAR [parinc.com], to which the older test is licensed, is behind this. AFAIK, the doctors who authored the older test haven't personally claimed infringement. My guess is that they received a single payment for licensing their test to PAR, and therefore they have no financial stake in the success or failure of the newer test.