Authors and owners have usually different legal rights in economics and in public interests.

Not doctors but payer person/insurance owner have rights on medical diagnosis (excluding some special cases like epidemic/quarantine diseases, criminal actions). Doctors "Creation of mind" is performed by state protocols/registration if you a not a "healer".

It is unclear what the thrust of your question is. Perhaps, you would care to be more clear or to explain your thinking.

For now, here is an example. Assume a doctor has diagnosed a patient as having Graves Disease -- it is named after Dr Robert Graves who first described the condition. Dr Graves is NOT the owner of the facts that lead to a diagnosis of the condition named after him.. Assume a doctor, say Dr Fortier in Toulouse France diagnoses a patient called Pierre as having Graves's Disease; neither Dr Graves or the modern day doctor Fortier are owners of the diagnosis. The facts or symptoms that led to the diagnosis are owned by Pierre, though in today's world various money-making digital service-providers may try to use the data for their own ends, and may try to claim ownership

That said, there was a mental processing and the outcome of the processing is a product of the mind, a creation of the mind, so to speak.

I hope I have answered your question... and now the ball is in your court Dr Concordet.

PS I know someone who is veterinary surgeon... perhaps he might have a different view?

Copyright law does not allow for protection of ideas, but does protect the embodiment of an idea as a recorded work. So a diagnosis itself is never protected, but someone describing how they went about obtaining a diagnosis and how successful it was in a medical journal or conference paper would own the copyright in that description. But that wouldn't stop other people using the method for their own diagnostic tests.

I was hoping that Dr Concordet would respond... a thousand pities. It is NOT enough to ask questions but also to actively participate...

I agree with Phil. If Dr Concordet won't respond it rather defeats the object of asking a question using LinkedIn

Sorry for the delay of my reaction. Thank you for your answers that only partially address my concerns. In fact, I do not have specific answers to your questions but rather a practical case to explain more precisely the motivations of the previous question. Imagine that a private company wants to buy a database in a hospital to perform a supervised automated learning. This database contains the data of each patient but also the diagnosis made by the various doctors of the hospital. While in the EU there have been long discussions about the ownership of the patient's data, the reasons for which this database is valuable, namely the diagnosis, are less clear. If I understood Charles' answer correctly, the diagnosis has no value in itself; it's just a datum like many other data. However, I feel that the diagnosis is in fact what makes the value of this database without being able to formalize it precisely.

Dear Dr Concordet,

Thank you for finally responding. You have asked two questions namely

1) Do doctors own their diagnoses? and perhaps corollary question of sorts

2) In other words, can the diagnosis of a disease be considered as a creation of mind?

I have tried to answer both.

You have to be a bit more explicit, in my view.

But you have now opened up another issue and I shall address that in an oblique fashion. For a start, if I were the decision-maker, I would not sell that data. There is no guarantee that the purchaser, say Company Y will use the data for developing automated learning only. The company will also need some antecedent-related data to develop a more accurate method of diagnosis.

Perhaps the data might contain personal data, medical history, of say Mr X. That data could be sold to insurance companies, marketing-related companies.The solution will be to remove all antecedental data such as age, ethinc background, medical history of siblings and parents. If there is no such removal, and before you know it, the company has whole picture of X, his or her siblings, parents, relatives -- which can all be done by aggregation. If that happens X's background is known to Y. And Y could sell it to all kinds of companies. The last couple of months have exposed what has been happening...

That said, a solution will be to remove all personal data. But we all know that certain medical or perhaps good health conditions are associated with ethnic backgrounds, due to perhaps a genetic disposition. Here are some examples: Chinese are known to have a high incidence of diseases of the naso-pharynx, the incidence of diabetes is high amongst Indians, and obesity is common amongst certain ethnic groups. Another example: Longevity amongst the Japanese in Okinawa is pretty impressive. The Tays-Sachs disease is likely to be more prevalent in people of Askenazi Jewish ancestry or amongst people of French-Canadian ancestry.

The $64 question: how can hospitals provide such data without disclosing ethnic data?

If a hospital does get to the point of selling data, then it should have strong legally enforceable agreements that can be used to sue the purchaser. More importantly, it should have the right to and monitor how the data is being used. Coming to AI and machine learning, I can tell you it is difficult to guarantee responsible use. The purchaser could argue that the machine was responsible, and not the company Y, as the machine performed "automated learning". This opens up a can of worms. My view you is not to sell the data. Or if it is necessary to sell the data, the seller should have a stake in Y. But that still, in the final analysis solve the problem. Once gain: DO NOT SELL SUCH DATA.

Readers may disagree but this is a forum for discussion, and if there is more discussion, we will be a bit more wiser on the benefits and threats of technology.

I totally agree with Phil Barbonis. My advice is not to sell the database to the company. Far too many privacy/data protection risks. Even a tightly-worded contract is no guaranty of unauthorised leakage of medical data. But thank you, Dr Concordet, for explaining the background to the query. Arguably the rights (database rights rather than copyright I suspect) in the diagnoses belong to the employing hospital as the doctors created the data as part of their employee duties.

Thank you very much for these interesting comments that help me to form an opinion.