The Laboratorium: How Copyright Is Like Cognitive Impairment

"The Sweet 16 is [an open access] cognitive impairment test. Its creators did a study to validate that Sweet 16 and MMSE [Mini Mental State Exam] scores correlated strongly, and that the Sweet 16 could be as effective when used in a clinical setting. And now for the bad news. The Sweet 16 is no longer available for download. As detailed in an essay by John C. Newman and Robin Feldman in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, PAR, the copyright owner of the MMSE, apparently requested that the Sweet 16 be removed from the Internet....PAR sells 50 MMSE test forms for $66, or $1.32 each. The Sweet 16 was designed to be a replacement for the MMSE, but available open-access, so that anyone could use it freely and for free. It appears that the owners of the MMSE didn’t like competition. Newman and Feldman (or perhaps their editors at NEJM) were too polite to say it, but I’m not: any copyright claim here is legally weak and morally indefensible...."