[Wikimedia-l] Radiological images

[Luis Villa]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 7:07 PM, George Herbert
<george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think this would be an excellent time for the Foundation to use those
> attorneys they have to render a real legal opinion as to whether this is
> clear or not, safe or not, etc. ...

This somewhat predates me, so I can't answer questions on it, but we
did a basic legal analysis on this topic a year ago:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Copyright_of_X-Ray_Images

Luis

> > On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 2:12 PM, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > From time to time there is discussion on Commons regarding the copyright
> > > status of radiological images. As no one has any idea if they are
> > > copyrightable and on the off chance they are, no one has any idea who
> > would
> > > owns the copyright, there is varying degrees of support to delete images.
> > > (possibilities for ownership include, Xray tech, patient, ordering
> > > physician, radiologist, employer which could be the hospital, health
> > > region, government)
> > >
> > > So there are 10s of thousands of these images. They are of great
> > > educational importance. Having Commons delete them all would be a shame.
> > > Are we going to go with a copyright interpretation different than that of
> > > the rest of the publishing industry, which allow both physicians and
> > > patients to publish images? From what I remember from American law it is
> > > frowned upon to have a lawsuit just to determine a legal interpretation.
> > >
> > > DIscussion regarding one image is here, however there have been a bunch
> > of
> > > others before this.
> > >
> > >
> > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Computed_tomography_of_human_brain_-_large.png
> > > If
> > > we go with a strict interpretation the only radiological images that
> > would
> > > be usable is those created by VA hospitals (maybe).


-- 
Luis Villa
Deputy General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
415.839.6885 ext. 6810

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