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I am not familiar with copyright law.

We want to make a paid service (i.e. a mobile app) that publishes manuals for procedures and other medical information thats written entirely by our staff.

We would have to reference articles from scientific journals and other sources. All published work.

The information we publish would be digested from multiple sources for each manual.

Would we be infringing any copyright laws?

Would we have to pay copyright fees to said sources for citing their work?

All published information would be of our own making. No direct quoting or use of any imagery from the referenced articles would be done.

For example

Pathology 1

  • Treatment:

    In all cases should be treated with drug A.

  • References:

    Citation to article

Would there be an issue including links to the referenced articles?

There are already applications that do this such as Sandford Guide, though I don’t know if they pay any copyright.

chromosome
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1 Answers1

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Citations and references and hyperlinks are not themselves copyright violations. Scientific principles and laws and knowledge are also not protected by copyright.

Copyright protects a particular expression of an idea, and not the idea itself. If an app quoted at length from a copyrighted article or tightly paraphrased it in a way unnecessary to express the underlying idea, this might be copyright infringement. But simply stating a fact and referencing a cited article for support is not a copyright violation.

ohwilleke
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