[Wikimedia-l] Radiological images

[Andrew Gray]

As often, I agree entirely with Risker - ethics and privacy are as big an
issue here as copyright and we need to be able to give a clear declaration
that both aspects are okay.

That said, I think Nathan has spotted a way forward - OA journals might be
the way to square this circle. Three points:

a) Medicine (thanks in part to our friends at the Wellcome and similar
groups) has been very active in adopting open access publication;
b) many gold (paid) open access uses a Wikipedia-compatible license, and
many funding mandates now require it;
c) most reputable journals now have robust ethics & subject-consent
policies and so we can work on the basis that images published in them will
be ethically usable;

Putting these three together, we might well have some good sources without
needing to develop our own ethical-clearance process. Searching for just
license-compliant OA articles is not yet a solved easy problem, but at
least we have somewhere to start looking.

Andrew.

On 17 September 2013 17:15, Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
> In many jurisdictions, there are specific privacy laws that address the
> rights of patients to control access to *any* information about them,
> whether identifying or not, and requirements that any use of patient
> information, whether anonymized or not, must be done with the consent of
> the patient unless specifically legislated. This has nothing at all to do
> with copyright. A surprisingly large number of studies, tissue samples,
> and so on *are* actually pretty easily identifiable. In many cases,
> patient consent is required in order to use information for research or
> educational purposes; those participating in research have to sign fairly
> extensive consent agreements that often include a clause about how their
> information will be shared.
>
> I'd suggest practitioners themselves ought to be quite cautious before
> uploading such images, and ensure that they have had a very specific
> discussion with their institution, and received *in writing* authorization
> for uploading. It is spectacularly wonderful that the physicians amongst
> us have such a strong desire to educate, and it would be horrible if
> someone lost privileges at their institution (and possibly their
> license) over such a benevolent gesture. Don't just call your professional
> association - have the discussion with the institution, and get things in
> writing and actively pursue an institutional policy on the educational use
> of medical images.
>
> Risker
>
>
>
>
> On 17 September 2013 09:21, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Maybe they don't own the images outright from a legal perspective, but
>> certainly ethics (and particularly medical ethics) is moving in the
>> direction of securing permission from the subject of the images before
>> they are used for purposes other than treatment. Documenting this kind
>> of permission in a format like Commons is going to be tough, but that
>> could be resolved with a policy of only using images published by an
>> organization known to pursue permission where feasible.
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 9:15 AM, Mathias Schindler
>> <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 1:06 PM, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com>
wrote:
>> >> My concern is that if we are going to be both super cautious and
assume
>> >> that X-rays are copyrightable than we will need to get permission from
>> all
>> >> 9 potential copyright holders (ordering physician, patient,
radiologist,
>> >> hospital, government, X-ray tech, machine manufacturer, software
>> >> programmer and the Queen of English in my jurisdiction, shareholders
of
>> >> hospitals in other jurisdictions).
>> >
>> > Out of the 9 categories of potential copyright holders, we should be
>> > able to eliminate patients as they are not an active part of the
>> > creation process and there is no transfer of copyright to them.
>> >
>> > Mathias
>> >
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-- 
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk