Minnesota University sues over MMPI 2 Online Test

In January 2012, the Regents of The University of Minnesota, and NCS Pearson, Inc (The owners of the right to distribute the MMPI) filed a lawsuit against New Zealand Hypnotherapist and Psychologist. The Psychologist was at the time living in the United States and returned to New Zealand to aid his family in the last few weeks of his dying Grandmothers care and funeral.

The lawsuit filed for damages of $500,000 and demanded removal of the MMPI test, on the Hypnotherapy website Mindfit Hypnosis. In addition Pearsons and the University of Minnesota DEMANDED to be informed of every post and update on All Social Media and any other websites administered by the owner of Mindfit Hypnosis.

When contacted by the Media at the time, the Psychologist stated that at this time he was helping his family make the passing of his grandmother as comfortable as possible and would deal with the situation in short time. Within a week the MMPI Test was removed from the Mindfit Hypnosis Website. Several Months later in response to a retro-active complaint from Pearsons to PayPal, a lifetime ban was placed on Mindfit Hypnosis being able to process payments for Hypnotic MP3s available on this website.  He stated when asked why he provided the MMPI test online, “It was a public domain free facsimile that I thought would be of benefit visitors to my hypnosis website, as are many of the free articles available there.

As part of the settlement, the Psychologist removed the MMPI from his website, saying while he believed this information should be available to the public, he was in no position to fight against the Lawyer engaged who literally wrote the book on International Copyright used in American Universities.  “I removed the test from my website, told the lawyers I was traveling the world, and that they could do what they liked – but I was not prepared to advise them of every website I had and each Facebook post”.

1) Practicing the Test Makes it Invalid:

Stuart Hemphill, an attorney representing the University of Minnesota, said the contents of the test need to remain private.

“We are concerned that the test responses are not valid when there has been prior exposure,” he said. “If they’ve seen it before, then the responses can be of questionable validity.” (citation)

This is an admission of great concern:  For decades the use of the MMPI tests have been used to determine acceptance of job offers and litigation of child custody in courts.  It is done so because the promoters of the MMPI test claim consistently that the test is robust and unable to be cheated.  Yet here the lawyer for the case slips up and acknowledges that the creators of the MMPI test have concerns to it’s fallibility.

2) Minnesota University holds Copyright of Questions Used:

The main basis of the Law suit was that the University of Minnesota holds international copyright of the questions used in the MMPI. The Psychologist claimed that he was using a public Domain test created and provided for use by it’s author.   He initially believed that the University should first prove this software he was using was not owned by the author, and the University then added the Website Host provider to increase the pressure.

In the end, the website owner decided as much as he wanted to provide this information for free, the bottom line was – it did not contribute to his bottom line.