At what point does some, or all of the copyrighted material become public domain? Patents have a life span of what? 10 years... copyrights also have a lifespan...
________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Fred Trotter Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 8:20 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [openhealth] Re: list of diagnoses and procedures It is easy at first glance to think that way. Consider the other side of the equation. The AMA worked for a long time to create accurate procedure and diagonsis codes. The goverment choose the AMAs coding scheme for reimbursement. But the government cannot simply take a private companies copyright and make it public domain; the AMA owns the copyright. The court held that as long as the license fees were not onerous there was nothing that could be done. As a result we have this "elvish" situation. This is actually one unique subset on the problem of "owning ideas". Software Patents and proprietary software are other examples of this problem. Hopefully future work will have a more FOSS-compatible perspective. -FT Regards, Fred Trotter On 12/11/06, K.S. Bhaskar <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:ks.bhaskar%40fnf.com> > wrote: > > I find this discussion of CPT codes & reimbursement interesting. Let me > paraphrase: > > "To petition your Government (for reimbursement), you need to submit > your request in Elvish. Organization XYZ owns the Elvish language. > Ergo, to communicate with your Government, you need to buy a license > from XYZ to use Elvish." > > This seems quite an incredible state of affairs. > > -- Bhaskar > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > -- Fred Trotter http://www.fredtrotter.com <http://www.fredtrotter.com> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
