My Doctor's Office Asked Me To Lie

Could you imagine at the extremes if you had been refused treatment because of your refusal to sign this document, to which you knew to be untrue, and to which they could not provide you with the policy. I studied law for four years (haven't qualified) , but I'm still not even sure on the liability on this one (if there is any at all in this hypothetical).

It just shows how bureaucratic everything has become when a privacy policy contains 3000 pages, to which they clearly never refer to, and to which you are most likely the first person to have ever asked to actually see the policy.

Best wishes with your health Richard!

Yeah. As it says on the bottom, "Copyright 2011 Richard Stallman released under Creative Commons Attribution Noderivs 3.0 unported".

It's a surprising statement for many reasons. First, I have traditionally thought of CC as somehow opposed to GNU, but here's Stallman releasing with CC. Second, it's a 2011 document -- had he not been to a doctor prior to 2011? unlikely, so maybe he just never noticed what he was signing?

Perhaps the most surprising thing is the "noderivs" part. One important text -- the GPL -- is also released as copyrighted, to discourage people from modifying the GPL in their COPYING documents in their repositories. But CC Noderivs prohibits any modification of this little snippet. I thought the whole point of free software was modifiability -- but Stallman doesn't think that this applies to free art? Meanwhile, it is not released as share-alike, which is the CC license which "copylefts" the work in the way that the GNU GPL acts to copyleft software.

It's not exactly an isolated case. When I turned 18 I was presented with the same document. To my mother's dismay, I pointed out the flaws and then marked in the necessary negatives in pen to render the document useless before signing it. Since the other party (a member with legal power at the clinic) did not sign after me, I'm not sure the form is actually binding on either of us. Could somebody clarify what precedent holds in the case of a single party signing a contract and having it accepted but not signed by the other?

EDIT: It occurs to me that I should mention that there is no place for the other party to sign on the document in the first place. There may have been a photocopied signature already on the form.

Stallman's mentioned at various times that he doesn't think modifiability is nearly as important for expressive type works. He has a very user-centric view on why software (and hardware) should be free, basically that users should be able to modify their own devices and share the modifications, or at least pay someone to make the modifications for them, as part of the right to fully use/customize/control your own computational environment.

Being able to modify and distribute copies of Stallman's 2011 narrative account of a doctor's visit doesn't seem (to me, at least) to implicate a similar right-to-your-own-devices rationale. Reuse in the artistic domain is more of a "remix culture" type of thing, which I think Stallman is sympathetic to, but it's not his core interest.