Papers continue to face retractions for failure to license pricy tool

I'm genuinely surprised that copyright is being used to control the use of a "scale" in science, and that the legal threat was used to take down a paper criticizing it as "no more accurate than flipping a coin".

Wouldn't science be under the umbrella of fair use, and publishing papers be under the umbrella of educational use?

It's undoubtedly a money-grab, and it reminds me of the people who extorted restaurants, etc., for singing "Happy Birthday", until the courts ruled that the song was in the Public Domain already (and had been for a very, very long time).

I sometimes wonder, if everyone were so petty, then we'd be paying former Baseball great Al Kaline for every alkaline battery.

Greed.

Donald Morisky, now a professor emeritus in community health at UCLA. As the name implies, the measure allows researchers to assess patients’ adherence to drug regimens.

Morisky made a business out of licensing the scale and demanding steep fees for researchers who failed to obtain the proper permissions, as we reported in Science in 2017. Researchers who cannot afford the payments Morisky and his business associate demand have been forced to retract their work.

What an asshole. I already think it's sketchy that instruments like the wAIS or other scales are monetized, but this scale has only 6-8 questions and the latest version was retracted after being challenged as no better than chance. Absolute garbage.

Open source scales should be table stakes for open source science.