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Because these presentations will be available to individuals outside the healthcare system, we are required to be more careful regarding copyright and privacy issues.

Copyright

It’s easy to borrow photos and videos from the internet, and people often do so. However, just because it’s easy and everyone is doing it, it doesn’t mean that we should.

According to U.S. copyright law, any creative work is copyrighted the moment that it is created. That work is only available in the public domain if the copyright has run out (the life of the author plus 70 years) or if the author designates the work as being in the public domain.

For this reason, we must give credit to the authors of creative work. Please help us track down the original video/photo so that we can provide a link to it.

Privacy

As oncology professionals at the University of North Carolina hospitals, we take patient privacy seriously. If you think that a patient’s case is best told by the patient, the legal department wants written legal consent with 2 witnesses before we can broadcast patient information. With minors, we need the consent of both parents as well as 2 witnesses.

We also need to be cautious with celebrities. Even though famous people expect that their lives will be conducted in the floodlights of stardom, we risk crossing a line if we diagnose their health issues­—which might be expected to remain a private matter—in a public space. For this reason, we ask that anonymous photos be used as examples of health problems.

 

Please direct any questions to the UNC Lineberger Cancer Network at unclcn@unc.edu.