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Dentist Who Used Copyright To Silence Her Patients Drops Out of Sight
According to a report at Ars Technica, a dentist named Stacy Makhnevich, who billed herself as "the Classical Singer Dentist of New York," threatened patients who wrote bad Yelp reviews with lawsuits, along the same lines as the online dental damage-control outlined in a different Ars story in 2011. This time, though, there's something even stranger than bargaining with patients to forgo criticism: when a patient defied that demand by describing his experience in negative terms on Yelp, Makhnevich followed up on the threat by seeking a takedown order based on copyright (putatively signed over to her for any criticism that patients might write, post-visit) — then disappeared entirely when lawyers for patient Robert Lee filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the validity of the agreement.
Most patients, when walking into the office of a new medical provider, are given a stack of forms to sign by a harried receptionist who expects them to just sign the paperwork and hand it back. Few people actually read them.
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"What's most surprising about this story to me is that any patients would sign such a contract."
Read the Ars Technica piece by the writer who tried to say "no" to such a contract. In short: he gets booted out the door. Now imagine you're in pain and maybe scared about a possible medical emergency (as the patient in the lawsuit here was). Situations like that is why oversight of a time-critical service like this is needed.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/all-your-reviews-are-belong-to-us-medical-justice-vs-patient-free-speech/
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes