When I went to law school in mid-life, some people were admiring, some excited, some horrified.  Law elicits strong emotions, and sometimes mere acquaintances actively encouraged me or beseeched me to stop!  Some of the people who have been the most encouraging have been my doctors, perhaps because they identified with the impulse to follow a course of study that is rigorous and demanding.

Recently, I saw my optometrist for the first time since I’d gone to work for the Health Sciences Copyright Management Office and passed the bar.  He asked how the bar was (awful, but it’s over) and then about my work.  When I explained that I worked with copyright education for the Health Sciences at OSU, he asked what many wonder but seldom come out and ask:  Why copyright in the health sciences?   Patents are prevalent in the biomedical world to protect intellectual property, and trademarks are important in some areas of health-related business, but what does copyright, which people often associate with the arts and humanities, have to do with the health sciences?

As I went on to explain to my optometrist, copyright protects creative expression that is fixed in tangible form.  That expression can take the form of a painting, short story, or song, but it can also take the form of a paper describing a clinical trial, a medical illustration, or a podcast for continuing medical education.  Although the ideas behind the creative expression cannot be copyrighted, and inventions are protected by patent, not copyright, almost anyone who communicates with others creates and consumes copyrighted material.