Subject:  Is Your Thesis for Sale?
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 10:31:40 -0400



Once I saw my diss listed, I was surprised to realize that I was pretty
pissed off--my reaction surprised me because I am against the closing down
of sites like Napster. In my case, it has nothing to do with fear of
non-academics having access to dissertations. In the US you have the option
to buy copyright for your diss (which I did) which must entail some rights?
I feel ambiguous about UMI which seems to have a monopoly on US
dissertations and makes their production and submission a *very* expensive
endeavor. (I paid over $500 in copying, copyright and other fees.) But it's
different than the reason I support Napster--in that case, the large
corporate monopolies of music production sued an individual because they
feared they were not able to continue to make ridiculous profits off of
their artists. In this case, you have one monopoly selling works that are
copyrighted to another corporation and once again the producer of the work
is completely powerless to determine its distribution and has no access to
royalities.Not to mention none of us were informed. I think I would feel a
little better about it if NBC, CBS, Microsoft and other monopolies were not
behind this.

I'd be interested to hear UMI's justification. I am not sure the contract I
signed with them allows them to do this. Liz DeLoughrey



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