Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 07:01:03 -0400
Subject: Re: [Fwd: (Fwd) Is Your Thesis for Sale? [Sessionals list]]


 you're right -I checked with the last name as keyword (i discovered there are
several people who are not related to me who are phds and who have the same last
name as me) - and mine is there, so is my husband's - is this legal? what does
this mean?


r





Clara Joseph wrote:

> Unbelievable!  MA Theses and Dissertations are on sale!!!
>
>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject: (Fwd) Is Your Thesis for Sale? [Sessionals list]
> Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 22:20:51 -0400
> From: Lauren Gillingham <laureng-AT-YorkU.CA>
> To: EGSA-AT-YORKU.CA
>
> This recently came through on the sessionals' listserv -- those of
> you heading toward theses or dissertations might be interested
> (not to mention alarmed).
>
> Lauren
>
> ------- Forwarded message follows -------
> To:                     "'sessionals-AT-topica.com'" <sessionals-AT-topica.com>
> From:                   "McIntosh, Tom HE0" <TMCINTOS-AT-health.gov.sk.ca>
> Subject:                Is Your Thesis for Sale? [Sessionals list]
> Date sent:              Wed, 09 Aug 2000 14:00:36 -0700
> Send reply to:          TMCINTOS-AT-health.gov.sk.ca
>
> A series of postings to PolCan (the listserv of the Cdn Poli Sci Assoc.) has
> recently brought to light a rather disturbing issue with regards to the
> status of graduate theses.
> When you submit your thesis/dissertation you are required to sign a release
> that allows it to be deposited in the National Library in Ottawa.  The
> Library then contracts with a company that provides (at cost) copies of your
> thesis to other researchers/institutions upon request.
> Apparently, the contract with the Nat'l Library is now held by Bell & Howell
> and they have sub-contracted with a corporation called 'Contentville' to
> sell theses and dissertations over the web - for a profit.  Below is the
> content of some recent PolCan postings that gives more background.  It is
> rather long, but it is worth reading:
>
> >From Kennedy Stewart:
>
> Dear Polcan Subscribers,
>
> Recently a friend recently discovered, quite by fluke, that an online
> company - http://www.contentville.com/ <http://www.contentville.com/>  - has
> been selling my Masters thesis for about $60.00 US. After contacting the
> company, I was told that I would receive royalties for any copies sold.
> However I am deeply concerned that royalties will only be shared by those
> people who contact the company.
> Further still, there are bigger issues to consider here, including possible
> publication conflicts. For example, will a publisher be willing to publish a
>
> PhD thesis that is already offered on-line? I attach the following
> correspondence in chronological order for you information. I am not sure
> what actions I will take, but am open to suggestions.
>
> Yours,
> Kennedy Stewart (PhD Cand)
>
> 1)      Initial E-Mail
>
> It has come to my attention through the grad caucus of the Canadian
> Historical Association that theses deposited with the National Library of
> Canada have been given/sold to an American company to sell on the Internet.
> This is obviously a big problem, as we did not sign away our rights to
> control the sale of our work. (I am not sure what the case is for American
> theses, but there are many on this site.) Check out the site - your work may
> already be there (mine is!). http://www.contentville.com/
> <http://www.contentville.com/>  According to one grad student from York
> University, apparently pretty much everyone who had finished in the last 12
> or so years had their theses on sale; for faculty who completed their
> degrees at US institutions it went back to the 60s.
> Please get involved in helping stop this - contact your graduate faculty,
> University President, the National Library, anyone you feel can mobilize to
> help change the situation. Either we are properly informed and authorize
> (and remunerated for) such a sale of our work, or it is removed from this
> (and any) company's possession. What the National Library's part is in this
> is not yet known, but this situation may require a clarification of our
> rights under the agreement we sign with them.
> Jenea Tallentire
> PhD student, History
> University of British Columbia
> Canada
>
> 2) My E-mail to Contentville
>
> To whom it may concern,
>
> Before I start legal proceedings, I am offering you the chance to explain
> how you think you have the right to sell my Master's thesis without my
> permission, or for that matter, without even contacting me.
>
> Sincerely,
> Kennedy Stewart (PhD cand.)
> London School of Economics
>
> 3)Contentville's Reply
>
> Dear Mr.Stewart,
>
> Thank you for your e-mail. I am glad you asked first. We appreciate your
> concern. We regret that there has been some confusion about our efforts to
> bring so much underused, valuable content to the consumer market place for
> the first time. Let me assure you, we have no intention of selling anything
> in a way that precludes the rights holder from his or her appropriate share
> of any revenues we receive. We are selling dissertations pursuant to a
> license agreement with Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company
> (previously UMI). We have been assured, in our contract with Bell & Howell,
> that they have these rights. If it turns out that they don't and they tell
> us, we will take your dissertation off of our site. In this case, we would
> be delighted instead to sell your dissertation and negotiate an appropriate
> royalty with you. Bell & Howell/UMI is taking phone calls at
> #1-800-521-0600. Meantime, we are keeping careful records of all sales by
> dissertation and author so that we can make all appropriate payments.
>                 Sincerely,
>                 Catherine Seda
>
> >From Dennis Pilon:
>
> A fellow in our department has been pursuing this issue as well.  His point
> is, basically, we signed an agreement with the National Library to make out
> theses available to other scholars for FREE, not for profit, and certainly
> not for the kind of profit seekers at work here.  Academic research is
> supposed to an uncommodified pursuit for good reason - so that money doesn't
> compeletely determine what we can study.
>
> Dennis Pilon
> York University, Political Science Graduate Program
>
> PS - Here's his email:
>
> The issue here is not whether or not contentville intends to negotiate the
> payment of royalties. I'm not under any crazy illusion that they've sold a
> whole bunch of copies of my MA Thesis, and I am not looking to be paid for
> it. For all I care, anybody is welcome to post copies of my Thesis on the
> web for free download.The point here is that a large company (contentville
> is owned in part by
> CBS, NBC, and Microsoft, all of whom are involved in their own copyright
> enforcement activities) is making money from my work. If they had asked
> permission, I certainly would have denied it to them, as my work is not
> intended to be a commodity for sale only to those who can afford
> contentville's outrageous prices.
>
> For Contentville to offer to negotiate is dishonest. They aren't stupid,
> they are big corporations who are able to hire high-priced copyright
> lawyers, and they are very familiar with the law. They know that what they
> did when they posted my work for sale without my permission was illegal,and
> they know that their claim on the website that they own the copyright is
> completely false. They are merely trying to push the envelope as far as they
> can until they are forced to change their business practices.
>
> There may be some ambiguity about who owns the copyright on theses and
> dissertations, but there is no such ambiguity about the articles written by
> journalists that they also were illegally selling.
>
> To ask to negotiate a royalty arrangement after they have taken someone
> else's work and started selling it is like asking the person you steal
> something from to negotiate for its return. I have no bargaining position
> when dealing with contentville - what can I do if I don't like their first
> offer? If I turn it down, why would they make me a better offer? The only
> power I have is the power to use the legal system to force them to stop
> selling my work, and then allow them to offer me some money in exchange for
> the rights to sell it, should I choose to.
>
> For those who saw the story in the Star on Friday, let me clarify that the
> story is unclear when it reports that Bell and Howell (owners of UMI) 'owns
> rights to almost all PhD theses in North America since 1861'. They do
> control some rights, but not all. They have a right to distribute my MA
> Thesis for scholarly purposes only, not for profit.
>
> So when contentville says, as Graham points out, that:
> >  All Dissertation Publishing Agreements with authors remain in effect.
> Dissertation authors retain all rights to their dissertations.
>
> they are not telling the truth. If I don't retain the right to stop
> contentville from selling my Thesis for proft, then what right do I retain?
> The right to sell it myself, perhaps - but that is not all the rights there
> are. The right to stop someone else from profitting from it without my
> permission must be considered part of the rights that I ought to retain.
>
> Of course, there is also the obvious problem that they aren't going to
> negotiate with anyone who doesn't find out that their work is being sold
> without their permission. So their offer to negotiate and agreement cannot
> be taken seriously. They only make this offer after the victim of the theft
> has discovered the theft.
>
> For those who are also victims of the piracy, I have been able to find out a
> few thidetails of how this happened.
>
> Theses, which generally are copyright by the author, go to the National
> Library of Canada, which has a long-standing deal with UMI to distribute
> them only for scholarly purposes, to other university libraries and similar
> institutions. UMI was, however, bought by Bell and Howell at some point,and
> now Bell and Howell has a deal with contentville, which is an ordering
> service for these and many other writings.
>
> So far, I've asked all the organizations involved to cease the sale of my
> thesis, but the only response I am getting is a bureaucratic run-around. My
> MA thesis is still for sale through contentville. (But I'll email anyone a
> copy to save them the $US 30.)
>
> The National Union of Writers (A US body representing freelance journalists)
> has discovered contentville's activities, and negotiate a royalty agreement,
> which also covers members of the Periodical Writers of
> Canada.
>
> NBC is partly responsible for shutting down iCraveTV, a website which
> rebroadcast TV signals that were available with an aerial antenna in toronto
> on a website. CBS is partly responsible for trying to shut down Napster, and
> Microsoft won't shut up about how evil software piracy is. Yet these
> companies have  appropriate the intellectual property of others to increase
> their own profits.
>
> So if Graham's position is motivated by a desire not to stop anyone from
> making use of the potentional of the technology to increase access to
> scholarly work, that is a worthwhile position. But the question is not
> access to ideas - the problem is a double standard: Intellectual Property
> Rights for large corporations, but not for the independent content provider.
>
> Again, I encourage anyone who has written an MA Thesis in North America (or
> a PhD thesis) to look at www.contentville.com <http://www.contentville.com>
> to see if your work is there.
> If it is, please let me know. (I'll let you know here that this is precisely
> the subject of my own dissertation research, so you'll be helping in a
> chapter of mine, but it will also strengthen the position of the argument
> that I might need to have with the National Library.)
>
> Derek.
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Derek Hrynyshyn,
> Graduate Program in Political Science,
> York University, Toronto.
>
> Finally, a course of action you might consider from someone at SSHRC:
>
> I just had a conversation with a customer service person at Contentville.
> Her story was that all royalties from the sale of Canadian dissertations go
> to the National Library. The issue of negotiating a royalty with individual
> authors was not something they were considering. She refused to provide a
> copy of the contract between Bell and Howell, Contentville, or the
> NationalLibrary.
>
> I asked for a contact at the Library and was given the number of Mel
> Simoneau at (819) 953-622. (I left a message and will post anything
> further.)
>
> I suggest that we contact Mr. Simoneau, en masse, for further information.
>
> Peter Norman Levesque
> Program Officer  CURA- Agent de programme ARUC
> Research and Dissemination Grants Programs Division-SSHRC
> Division des programmes de subventions de recherche
> et de diffusion de la recherche-CRSH
>
> Tom McIntosh, PhD.
> Senior Policy Consultant
> Policy & Planning Branch
> Saskatchewan Health
> 3457 Albert Street
> Regina, SK  S4S 6X6
> T:(306) 787-1582
> F: (306) 787-3974
> Tmcintos-AT-health.gov.sk.ca
>
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http://www.cyberdiva.org/




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