%0 Journal Article
%T Questions of Copyright
%A Caroline Anfray
%A Marie-Pierre Emery
%A Katrin Conway
%A Catherine Acquadro
%J Health and Quality of Life Outcomes
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1477-7525-10-16
%X Recently, the editors of this journal kindly suggested that a brief editorial on the subject of Copyright might be more useful than the comprehensive article on the subject that we had previously submitted. This is our response to their proposal.We all understand copyright - or do we?According to the Oxford English Dictionary, copyright is:"The exclusive legal right, given to an originator or an assignee to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, and to authorize others to do the same."No one has a legal right to do anything with any original production unless authorized to do so by its originator or an authorized deputy. This includes simple copying, quotation, or manipulation of any kind.It is worth mentioning at the outset that of a total of some 2,300 requests for information on Patient-Reported Outcomes (PRO) measures received by MAPI Research Trust in 2009, a not-for-profit company, 90% of the questions concerned copyright. The requests were submitted by developers and users of PRO measures as well as publishers.At various occasion, the Trust has presented a review of the major international instrument on the topic (the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works) to help in the exercise of copyright [1-3]. In 2009, Anfray published a discussion about the controversy between Juniper and Grammatopoulou on the 18-item version of the AQLQ(S) [4]. It was at this occasion that Revicki and Schwartz [5] made a clarification of a subject that is more complicated than it first appears. In their editorial, they detail important reasons for developers to exercise their rights. In particular, "the maintenance of the scientific integrity of the copyrighted instrument which will ensure researchers and readers of scientific journals that the study used the correct version and that there is evidence supporting the psychometric qualities of the instrument." In the light of the recent FDA guidance on the use of PR
%K Patient-Reported Outcomes
%K Patient-Reported Outcome Measures
%K Copyright
%K Intellectual Property
%U http://www.hqlo.com/content/10/1/16