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COURTS✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
Long-lasting dispute over ‘Morisky Widget’ IP yields fresh lawsuit
Filed 1h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk
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Farting Around
Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
A new lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court accuses Professor Emeritus Donald Morisky of fraud and breach of contract, the latest chapter in a fight over ownership of the widely used Morisky Widget, a tool for gauging whether patients take their medication as prescribed.
MMAS Research says a 2020 settlement meant to hand Morisky ownership of the tool was never actually finalized, leaning on a 2024 Ninth Circuit ruling to that effect, and argues Morisky's own 2021 company has no rights to license the product he's been licensing anyway.
Morisky has his own five-year-old Seattle lawsuit claiming he is the rightful owner, where a judge in April found MMAS Research had defaulted for repeatedly violating court orders; a separate Los Angeles suit by MMAS against Morisky was tossed this year for duplicating the Seattle claims.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
Two men split a company, argued over who owns the quiz that made it valuable, and five years and three courts later nobody involved seems any closer to a straight answer. The tool itself gets called a gold standard by the people selling it, which is the kind of label that ages about as well as most things people say about their own products. Whoever finally wins the paperwork, the patients filling out the questionnaire won't notice a thing.
