For the record.

I tried to paste the following to the MD forum but it seems to have a
headache tonight, so I thought I would post it to this moribund list for
safety's sake.

David

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: MD3 licence agreement
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:54:40 +1100
From: David Guest <dguest@...>
To: David Guest <dguest@...>


> David
> I think you are incorrect. The MD blurb is retained on the assumtion
> that is some defence for the vendor if clinical software misuse
> results in litigation. The practicality of that screen opens a
> cross-defence by a user that the display is short of really forcing an
> informed consent to product use.
> It is about clinical error more than the usual EULA on intellectual
> property rights which appears on the installer process.
> In betaland, we suggested that it should be seen once per user per
> software cycle.
> For it to work as you propose, it would have to be like OpenOffice
> where you have to scroll down the entire agreement and cannot accept
> till you get to the end, every time MD is opened, or whenever a user
> logon is changed during a session. As a minimum.
> Given its questionable legal status, that is not an acceptable
> imposition on users.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't agree with any of that Bob. The first paragraph clearly says:-
> IMPORTANT INFORMATION - Please Read
>
>
> Clicking on the "I Agree" button below indicates that you have read,
understand
> and agree with the contents of this document.
>
That seems to trigger a clear cut consequence of a clear cut action to me.

The part I have problem with is the next paragraph.

> Copyright
> All supplied databases are copyright protected. None of them may be copied, or
> used outside of the Medical Director software program (Medical Director), or
> reproduced in any way or by any process, without written permission from the
>
snip

I think it has been clearly established that one a right to the data you
have created. That data has to have structure to it for it to be
interpreted. While there are all sorts of clever things one can
copyright in relation to database design and implementation, the
ontology of the medical record cannot be made copyright. It would
therefore be nice if HCN did something like state that the XML
representation of a user's record was not subject to copyright.

David

P.S. The full MD3 licence agreement for version 3.8.2 Update 2 (with
lost formatting) can be found here,
http://ozdoc.mine.nu/hcn/legal/MD3_Agreement.txt.