This is a dental blog today about my life in dentistry, so if you read the blog and you're not a dentist, and you get bored with these, then skip along.
Recently, I've had to consider the position of intellectual property in terms of patient images, videos, and presentations that are provided from the work that's carried out at our place, but also as I look widely at the work that's carried out at other places.
I've been staggered for ages that if you work for a dental corporate, you can just photograph patients, put it on social media, in fact, you're encouraged to do so by some of the corporates around the ‘guys of marketing’. I'm also staggered that associates come into practises and then assume that everything that they do is their property and they can take it with them with no real consideration of where they have done that or whose patient that might be or how the patient may have arrived.
But I'm not here to chelp about that or to get upset about it because that's for your business and for you to sort out, a conversation to have with the people you work with, and the development of a culture and a team.
What I'm more interested in is how people get precious about the intellectual property of the clinical procedures that they carry out, or the presentations that they provide.
I first came across this when one of the people who spoke in the ITI (retired now) refused ever to give copies of the slides after a lecture.
That just did not make sense to me under any circumstance, because I felt like some of the best ways to reinforce or cement the knowledge that you've received in the lecture would be to review the slides, I then realised that people were giving out terrible PDF copies of slides that were very tiny, so that people couldn't copy them or go off and speak.
To protect your slides like this is to suggest that your presentation is generic and that anyone could provide it.
I promise you, if you were to take one of my presentations that I've put together, let's say a marketing lecture for the Aesthetic Days Congress in Villamura, Portugal, last year, you'd never be able to present it the same way I presented it.
You may present it a lot better, and that would be because you were a much better presenter than me, but the likelihood is you wouldn't understand it, because your slides are a prompt. They're not the lecture; they just allow you to deliver the lecture.
The other point that must be raised here in terms of IP, together with dental photographs, procedures, lectures, etc, is that this world is moving fast, and if you're not moving fast with it, very soon you will be overtaken and swallowed up.
I remember way back now (it always seems to me to be not long ago) when I was in China in 2018, in September or October, and before my first lecture in Wuhan (yes, it was probably me that started it all). I was sat with the young translator who would translate the lecture to the hundreds of people I would speak to.
At that stage, it was a really good lecture that I was proud of on type 2 implant placement, which is now much more out of date than it was then, after advances in implant dentistry and understanding.
He commented on me about how good it looked and how impressed he was by the lecture, and so I asked him if he wanted my slides. He was staggered and couldn't believe that I would give them away for free, but ‘what was I going to lose by doing this?'
I gave him the slides on Keynote so that he could present them, or use them, or alter them or edit them, and he could run wild with them as much as he wanted.
Surely, the cascade of knowledge works like that. Surely, I want people to present my material widely. And yes, they might get paid for it, but there's only one of me, and I couldn't present it simultaneously in two different countries.
The point with IP is this: it's really worth nothing. What's worth something is your insight and your ability to present, and what's worth more than that is your ability to continue to push forward on the frontier of the new.
That's where the value is, not in a slight d**k.
Blog Post Number - 4445