Doctors and the DMCA
Posted on August 24th, 2009
TechDirt reports that some doctors are having patients sign contracts that say the patients won’t rate the doctor online. Worse, the contract assigns to the doctors the “intellectual property” rights for anything the patient may write about the doctor. So, if the patient rates or reviews the doctor on a public site, the patient has violated the doctor’s copyright. This then enables the doctor to issue a DMCA takedown notice to get the site to remove the patients’ review.
Copyright. What can’t it do? Wow.
I’d guess, not as a lawyer, that it is as unenforceable as the forms some doctors tried to get patients to sign saying the patient could not sue them for malpractice.
That being said, I don’t think most of the sites are very representative of the doctor’s qualities. I suspect that the most likely patients to respond are unhappy ones or perhaps very happy ones; either group is a skewed sample. Also, some of the evaluations are based on very few responses.
Some of the qualities addressed may be important in some aspects, such as the friendliness of the staff or whether the doctor runs on time, but most can not evaluate a doctor’s competence.
As a doctor, I have trouble evaluating a doctor’s competency unless I know a lot about what they do.
holy crap.
I’ve had some funky non-expiring contracts before, but that one’s nasty. Why would I want to get work from a doctor who is so afraid of being reviewed that they have to pull that kind of crap?
That’s bs I don’t get it.
[...] on the back of movie or theatre tickets, that you can’t tweet about the show for 24 hours. [via David [...]