Date:         Thu, 10 Aug 2000 22:20:51 -0400
Subject:      (Fwd) Is Your Thesis for Sale? [Sessionals list]
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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**************************************************
Craig Gordon     (gordonc-AT-yorku.ca)
Graduate Programme in English
215 Stong College
York University
4700 Keele St.
Toronto, ON
M3J 1P3
Canada
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