Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best Copyright Terms For a Thesis?
plopez gets in his first Slashdot submission with this question, writing: "I am wrapping up an MS. In the past I have had problems getting copies of others' work, due to lack of copyright notices on their thesis or dissertation. I don't want that happen to me. I know the joke is 'No one will ever read your thesis,' but in the slim chance it is useful to others I don't want them to be required to hunt me down for a release. Basically I want to say: 'Copyright is released as long as this work or excerpts is properly attributed. Also, any published excerpts cannot be copyrighted by other parties, nor can the original work in its entirety.' Is this good enough? I don't want to encumber legitimate uses of the work but I also don't want some pirate coming along and stealing it out of public domain. Is public domain good enough? Or does it allow the work to be restricted by commercial interests? I know of copyleft, but copyleft is a family of copyright notices and I am unsure which one is right for my intent. Please help."
Creative commons has a tool to help, and human readable licenses. I'd guess you can find what you need there. http://creativecommons.org/
Because no matter what your intentions are, I would highly advise against jeopardizing the progress of your MS just because you want to use copyright terms that your department doesn't agree with. If you haven't already, I would very highly recommend you check with them first to see how they manage the copyright of theses that are written there. Depending on the institution you may even need to go higher than that to find the official policy and find out if it has any flexibility.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Do what everybody else does and put the PDF on your website. Anyone who Googles for it will find it and download it. No one will care about anything copyright related because you can't make a derivative work of a thesis anyway. It works for everyone else in academia; I assume it'll work for you.
Most universities own the copyright to anything you produce while attending, including your thesis. I'd check the terms with your university.
...by you and state the year you wrote it. Also, use the copyright sign and the phrase all rights reserved. Then this, "Copyright is released as long as this work or excerpts is properly attributed. Also, any published excerpts cannot be copyrighted by other parties, nor can the original work in its entirety," is assumed.
It doesn't matter what you want to put on your thesis, you university owns the copyrights to it.
I'd suggest you contact your Uni and put the same question to them, rather than 6 million /. Subscribers.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
You lose all control over the material and some ugly things can happen.
The Creative Commons licenses give you excellent control and they have a helpful tool on the website to pick the license you want. And attribution is required in the license which will handle your citation requirement.
There are others including the GNU free documentation license is a bit more specialized, but CC should be plenty for your needs and most importantly has a community of users and attorneys backing it up. You can probably get quite a bit of help if you ever need to defend it.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
put not for use on turnitin on the copyright
Some of need are vague and slightly contradictory when i read them.
Have a look at the Attribution-NonCommercial one that xkcd uses but that might interfere with journal publishing.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/
What to do you mean pirates if a pirate can access the file and they don't care about the copyright then it does not matter what license you use.
At my university (management in Canada so YMMV), theses are published by the library and copyright is owned by the school. But other universities can have access to it through shared databases/works as most of the stuff from journals. Beyond that, well nobody really will ever know about my thesis, if I wanted to, I'd have to publish it in a journal as an article and then they'd have copyright over it.
So make sure you check with your university first, they most likely have policies regarding this, especially if they publish your work (even if it's just sitting at the school's library)
You can't control the copyright. Your work belongs to the university, it's not fully yours. You need to cover this issue with your institute.
Just make a paper or a note out of it and send it to a relevant scientific conference or journal. Anybody wanting to use/cite your work will much appreciate that (much shorter) and peer-reviewed version. Also it would make your supervisor very happy.
"In the past I have had problems getting copies of others' work, due to lack of copyright notices on their thesis or dissertation."
Uhhh...huh? Theses are academic sources. The university library where the thesis was finished will have a copy. Lack of copyright notice does not mean you can't use the work as long as you don't simply reproduce it and sell it. I really don't understand what is being asked here.
At my university, I own the copyright by default, but when I tried to either do it public domain OR creative commons, the office which handles such things flipped out. They weren't angry or anything, they just didn't get it. It came down to doing things the usual way OR being late submitting and so not graduating. So, I have a typical copyright on my thesis.
However, now that I think about it (and you could do the same thing), since it's my copyright, there's nothing to stop me (or you) from re-publishing with a Creative Commons license after-the-fact. Hmmm....
You don't need a resume for that. Idiot. You must work at one of the lesser brands.
you can't make a derivative work of a thesis anyway
Derivatives from published, previous work is one of the foundations of educational research. You shouldn't copy the work, or duplicate it whole and call it your own (although I've seen this...), but almost all research, institutional and commercial, was based on previous work. "The reason I can see so far is because I stand on the shoulders of giants". But...if you're saying that you can't take a "chunk" of someone's thesis, call it your own, and publish it as your own work (thesis), I agree; that's plagorism.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
IANAL, but I think you are confused a bit between copyright and your license to use the work and patents for the ideas...
Your thesis is essentially "automagically" copyrighted the date that you write it (at least in the US). You may gain additional protections by asserting your copyright (via a simple notice asserting copyright), or registering the copyright (with the government). At a minimum, usually people incluse a copyright to clarify ownership. Typically, you own the copyright to your thesis (unless for some reason it can considered a work-for-hire say about some work sponsored by some company like if they paid your tuition or gave you money for research).
If you do own it, you can do whatever you want to license it. You can publish your terms for a license as to what sort of copyrights you are asserting as part of your document, but it isn't actually required (or necessarily binding either athough it can be used as evidence of an implied license). However, if you don't really own it, asserting ownership and including an implied license might get you in trouble (say if the real owner didn't like your giving any rights away with your included license and the infringer simply said that she relied on your statement, you might be on the hook for some damages).
Normally, it would be just enough to say that you have a copyright on it and be done with it. People can still reference it via fair-use and the actual ideas in your thesis may or may-not be patentable (since the US is now a first-to-file country, you are probably screwed in case someone wanted to steal yur ideas) copyright simply doesn't matter in these cases. As a general rule, you can't release your work to the public domain "with-a-catch". If it's public-domain, it's public-domain. If you care about someone stealing it out of the public domain, you really have to assert a copyright on it and keep it (or donate the copyright to someone you trust to keep it).
There is, however, a small technicality that you probably need to have answered first. How would someone stumble upon your thesis? Is it *published* somewhere? or is it just on your own personal website (essentially self-published). If it is published somewhere, the publisher may want to assert some copyright on that (unless is is just a university publication which sometimes doesn't care). For example, if you put a paper in an IEEE journal, the IEEE will want copyright assigned to them (so they can sell the journal) as a condition of publishing your paper. If this is the case, you actually don't have much of a choice in the matter.
(with proper attribution)
Any restriction on this is a despicable attack on the advancement of science.
Current journal paywalls ought to be against the law. They ensure that only academia
at the richest institutions have full access to other scientists' work.
Academics at poorer institutions, here and around the world, and amateur researchers
who may be just as intelligent as the established, are shut out. It is an outrageous
and unjustifiable situation.
We need a different economic model to pay for the service of editing and coordinating
peer review. Maybe that cost ought to be covered by a journal submission fee.
Hardcopy publication is now officially not needed, nor should we be paying hardcopy publishing
companies just for the right to view the online published information. That's rubbish, and
it's harmful to the progress of knowledge.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
This. When I wrote my thesis (for my bachelor's in CompSci), my Thesis department basically said "this is a work for hire, we own the rights to it, you can share it personally for academic pursuits" or something along those lines.
Work for hire? Who pays whom when a thesis is written? I always thought it was the student paying (indirectly through tuition) the professor. How can this be a work for hire?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Copyright © September 2011 by XXXXXXX. All rights reserved. This
document is hereby made freely available for the use of any and
all worldwide. Permission is granted to anyone to make or
distribute verbatim copies of this document, in any medium,
provided that, except with written permission, the text remains
unaltered, and this copyright notice and permission notice are
preserved. Except with written permission, no charge
whatsoever for redistribution may be made.
The thesis program at my campus is a joint progress between the campus thesis department and the internship the student undertakes. Every senior's thesis is about a real-world project that they develop and implement at the company they intern with; some theses have saved companies millions of dollars or increased the efficiency in processes by two or three times. Because of this, they are often seen as "works for hire"; the company is given the option up-front to make the thesis "protected" (not their term, but I forget the actual phrase) which means it's not viewable by the public (the college maintains a small library with all past theses).
"Work for hire" might be the wrong terminology, but there were copyright issues at work when I went through my thesis.
If your school/department is at least somewhat organized, they will already have guidelines stipulated on the format of the thesis document, and these guidelines would include a pre-defined copyright notice that you must include. That's been my experience at two different Universities, and as far as I am aware, it's not an option to swap in my own copyright notice.
All it really does is ensure that the University owns full rights to republish the work - but so do I.
What school did you go to? I need to make sure to recommend no one ever attend it.
Better yet, put it on a preprint server such as the arXiv. That way, you also get a Linus-style backup of your thesis for free.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
At Minnesota, where I teach, and where I did my Masters and Ph.D. theses, students and faculty own copyright to their original work, including scholarly work (papers, theses, etc.) and original course materials. See http://policy.umn.edu/Policies/Research/COPYRIGHT.html for details. My understanding is that this arrangement is extremely common in the U.S. I am a strong advocate of open source and creative commons, but in this case I would encourage you to simply copyright your thesis. That does not mean others cannot use it, it just means that they must attribute the work to you, and cannot claim it as their own.
I am wrapping up an MS. In the past I have had problems getting copies of others' work, due to lack of copyright notices on their thesis or dissertation. I don't want that happen to me.
Post a digital copy online. Problem solved. As long as a digital copy is available for free online, others will have access to it, regardless of its copyright status. If you're in a field like physics, you could post it on arxiv.org. If you're in a field that doesn't have anything like arxiv, just post it on your own site, or on a site such as scribd.
Find free books.
What country are you in? Copyright law is going to be different in different places, at least a bit.
What university are you at? Some universities require students' to turn over copyright in their work (although many don't). Some universities also have requirements or restrictions on how you may license the work- the most common one I've seen recently is requiring students to allow the library to provide an electronic version.
Assuming US law, part of your statement is redundant; someone else can't legally claim copyright in your work, either published excerpts or its entirety.
Your pirate/steal bit is a bit confusing, even without the normal misuse of the terms to describe infringement. ;) If something is in the public domain, anyone can use it for any purpose, commercial or not. Once you've put it in the public domain, in this situation it probably can't be taken out of the public domain. (It would be nice to say that can never happen for any reason, but there is some precedent for some foreign works that probably doesn't apply here).
Creative Commons does sound like your best bet- check it out. ^^
Score:-1 Asshole
So basically your shit got stolen by corporate thugs who held your education for ransom?
Your thesis will not be put to commercial use no matter the "license" because it interests no one. It will be bound cheaply with all the others and it will sit in a library and it will be forgotten. It is not important. The world is indifferent to it because it is not important. You are not important because you have jumped through this hoop. You are one of millions and you are not important.
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Warning: --Flammable Objects ahead!--
You're polishing your thesis, the crown jewel of a Masters of Science degree, and you can't figure this one out on your own?
Worse, you ask HERE!?!
Hint: Perhaps you should harness some of the experience in researching that you've piled into the past 5-7 years of academia, along with INSIDER ACCESS to academia to get an answer and recommendation worthy of consideration. Does your university have a law school? Go find a member of the legal faculty with some modern clue in the field of intellectual property.
On the other hand, you could rely on the 2^n monkeys on the Internet banging random crapola into keyboards to eventually come up with the "right answer".
Oh, wait......
( Sheesh.... )
Red
"embargo" is the term of art for withholding the thesis, usually these are set to expire after there is no longer some commercial value to protect (sometimes the thesis will turn into a book, or it will disclose some trade secrets).
In the large state owned higher education corporation where I work copyright is owned by the student, but patent and trade secret issues could also be involved.
I would use CC-BY-Attribution in OPs case. I can't imagine why the graduate division or the department would care (unless they are marketing the material in the works as some sort of publication or reports?)
Not quite. The copyright doesn't differ to them entirely, even if it's a protected thesis, but you are also limited in how you can distribute it yourself, even if it's public.
But for your thesis to be accepted by the college, it has to first be approved by the corporation; there are methods to get around this in case there's a falling out or the company otherwise drops out of the internship program, but I hear they're hard and time-consuming. So, yeah, the corporation can hold your education for ransom if you get a dick boss.
He may also want to check stuff he signed when signing up for the program. He may have already assigned the rights to the school.
I recently finished an ME myself, as part of this I had to submit digital copies to my university's library. Reading through those submission forms they automatically put it under one of the CC licenses. Where you are doing yours might as well.
But I do care about when something was written.
It is mind-boggling how many academic papers out there that don't have a damn date on them.
C'mon people -- if you want to help out the knowledge of the world, you're not being serious if you can't help us put it in a timeline.
Mod parent up +1 for truth.
my Thesis department basically said "this is a work for hire, we own the rights to it, you can share it personally for academic pursuits" or something along those lines.
That's such bullshit. If the institution paid you to write a thesis, then it would be a work for hire, but actually YOU pay the INSTITUTION to LET you write a thesis for them. How the hell can they claim copyright over it?
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...
First of all, it's your copyright to do what you want when you want. There's nothing preventing you from keeping all rights to yourself, then later republishing it under a creative commons or other license. In fact I suggest you do that, because if whatever you have is valuable someone will claim it.
So what, you say? I was threatened with a lawsuit by my former advisor. Basically I failed to copyright my code, and he had the university license it to his company. I wanted to use the code, and he said I couldn't because it wasn't mine. He was probably wrong, but I couldn't afford a lawsuit so I had to let it go. Later I learned that his threat wasn't an idle one--he ended up suing a former student.
Put a copy of your entire codebase as an appendix in your thesis. No one hesitated when I wrote "Copyright me. All rights reserved." I suspect there's a good bit of case law about the work you do for your education belonging to you. Putting your stamp on it makes it a lot easier, I suspect. IANAL though.
Please do not *ever* recommend ND for anything of this nature again.
Think about it -- research builds upon other research. That's the whole point of publishing research.
We *want* people to build on the work. ND *specifically* tells people 'you're not allowed to do *anything* with my research'. SA's another messy one, as it sets a restriction on derivatives.
The best thing authors should do is to make sure that they don't lose their rights to the document, so that they can re-distribute the paper, no matter what stupidity the journal publishers do. And for that, see Creative Common's Scholar's Copyright Project:
http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Yeah, I agree. Placing an embargo (thanks to the poster below for the term) on someone's thesis is one step too far. Yeah, the thesis demonstrates the student's ability to research and so on - but, it's also some marginal increase in knowledge. Knowledge is supposed to be free flowing in academia. Benefit all humanity and all that...
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
If you've got a web site and you can download your thesis from there, then it doesn't matter the terms because you haven't transferred exclusive electronic distribution rights to your University or a third party. Then, just to be sure, copy it to a preprint server that doesn't allow revocation of distribution rights. for example arXiv, or the equivalent in your field. At that point you've at least guaranteed distribution rights.
Support SETI@home
Upload it to a porn site.
Public domain protects anyone else from copyrighting it, but of course doesn't prevent anyone else from copying it. Claiming it as their own and trying to enforce copyright would be fraud, but someone might possibly try it. Public domain will not prevent anyone from removing attribution to you, or prevent anyone from doing anything else with the content except possibly prevent them from (successfully) claiming it as their own (if you or someone else challenges them).
A license like a Creative Commons one could do all that the public domain does, but also require attribution to you, and make it easier in court (or in threatening letters) to prevent others from falsely claiming your work or interfering with distribution through a frauduent copyright claim.
But in any case you'd have to actually do something to prevent someone else from doing something with what you publish.
--
make install -not war
And if you don't like that situation, the solution is to not sign up for the internship in the first place.
Grant "Usage Rights".
I'd go with the Creative Commons language, posted earlier. It will do what you want and has been examined by lawyers.
This was pretty good, but I prefer "ask slashdot" articles of the form "I have 5 million dollars to create "the computer center of the future" but my boss is an idiot, and what game card do slashdotters think I should use here? Also is it OK to put a comfy chair in the machine room?" When I was a kid, car mags use to run articles like "Porsche or Corvette - which is really better"? You need to keep the reader involved or they'll lose attention.
can you explain why ND is bad? As far as I can tell, it just means that you can't make a derivative of the work itself. In research, you're not supposed to change someone else's research into your own; you're supposed to build on it: i.e., take the idea in it, then write your own story of that idea. ND allows for it, because it applies to the exact text of the dissertation, not the idea behind it.
Then again, IANAL, and I would love to get some input from someone with more understanding of these terms.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
CC By SA
Do what everyone else does with preprint papers in your field. I don't know what people do with preprints in your field, but a MS thesis isn't peer reviewed in the way papers are, so it fits nicely in the preprint category assuming you've actually done at least a tiny amount of work that qualifies as original research. Ask what researchers do with preprints in your field and then do that. Even better, ask your adviser what you should do with your MS thesis. If you are going to to publish papers with your master's thesis work in it, then you may want to downplay your thesis in favor of those papers.
'derivative' would include something like grabbing a copy of a chart or a table of figures published in the first paper. I don't write papers, so I'm not sure how much of a pain in the ass it would be to remake them (though I imagine a lot, since raw data usually isn't included), but I see this tactic uses very very frequently in secondary papers.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Under the copyright portion of the code (17 USC s 101):
A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.
That definition include EVERYTHING that uses the original in ANY way. If you paraphrase or quote the original (or get too close to the phrasing of the original) you are building off of it (the particular expression, not the idea itself) and it is a derivative work. The real question is whether the use of the derivative is fair (the "fair use" balancing test), with the key being how much you transformed the work. In most cases this is so simple that people don't even think twice (a work took the plot of star-crossed lovers from another but in a completely new type of modern circumstance or that is a properly attributed one sentence quote). But in other cases, it can be much more difficult. The last thing a researcher wants is to have to worry about is whether his use is legally "fair" and instead should be allowed to do it, only bound by the ethics of the field.
While we are talking about mines, Share-alike is similar. It is a poison. Just look here. Someone uses by-sa and another uses by-sa-nc, you have to pick which you like better because you cannot use both.
I can't think of anything worse to do than seek legal advice from your school regarding your thesis. Sorry.
Because my work place did pay me to write the thesis. Again, it was a joint-venture of sorts; that's mainly where the whole copyright thing comes in.
so basically you can't do an actual academic thesis because it has to be for some company? sounds like a real top tier university you have going here...
Thesis advisor.
(I'm in the Cal State system, ie, possibly the most broke still-functioning institution of higher education in the entire country, and they still provide for us people who'll review your thesis and make sure the technical details are all OK)
flames
dude, it wasn't a serious question, it was just "look at me!"
You sound bitter... maybe you should consider finding another employer?
By the way, if you can't stand calculus, that doesn't mean you can't get any degree, just not a science degree. It's not like those are the only ones worth anything.
Yeah, that makes sense. Spend five minutes submitting this post directed towards a group that includes many people associated with or well-versed in free/libre/open copyright issues; or spend an hour or two tracking down which faculty would have an appropriate legal background -- assuming there are any, which is a HUGE assumption -- making an appointment, hiking over to their office, and taking a meeting with them. Boy, aren't you brilliant?
You are the author of the thesis and seem to have right to do anything with the paper, but you can not just slap any sort of copyright over that paper either, because your university will want it's share.
I am confused by the question. Copyright does not restrict others' right to read only their right to make copies, and in a practical sense distribute those copies. In academia there is always a requirement for proper attribution. The practical problem for you I am guessing is protecting your right to copy which you would lose if the university held the copyright. Also, commercial use may need to go through your university as the university may own all work produced in the course of your study. If you think there is commercial potential, check with the schools licensing office.
Please clarify your question. I really don't see how a lack of copyright notice could impede your ability to obtain published material.
This must be some master's
Don't bother, nobody will ever read it.
This is an odd case that demonstrates why words in legal senses have complex convoluted meanings. To "pay" someone is not necessarily to give them money. To "pay" is to give another entity a thing of value in exchange for services or goods they have rendered you.
... just not in cash.
In this case, you pay the school cash money and in exchange they allow you to attend classes and receive credit and so on. But they also are giving you things that are valuable: Course credit. Course credit, and degrees, are essentially the university using their reputation to enhance yours. Anyone can learn the content that is covered by a course; people pay a University so they will run you through a process designed to officially recognize that you have learned the content.
So you do some work for the University, and in exchange, they give you course credit - a thing of value. Thus they are saying it is a work for hire, that they 'paid' you for your work
These days, however much you want to put your work out there for any one to use, some one may try find a way to make a dollar off it with out even giving credit.
That was my first thought too.
Then I realised that this guy apparently does not know how to properly use citations.
It could be that that is a common problem in some kind of fields. Just haven't seen it in computer science.
(I'll give you a hint: BibTex has an @masterthesis entry.)
Not sure where you're writing from but I am pretty sure when I started my PhD in the UK the documents said the university owned the copyright on all the work I produced. Go back to the university's regulations that you signed up to and check what they say.
As another poster has noted, I don't think they'd chase you if you wrote up journal papers or books out of your thesis, and they are unlikely to mind your work being posted on your website, distributed across academic channels (usual repositories etc). I think their perspective is : we give you a grant / living expenses and access to our facilities and our professors for 4 years, we give you a globally recognised and highly respected qualification if you do what we ask of you, in return we own copyright your produce while working for us in this role.
My work isn't in a very patentable area so it wasn't a big issue for me as much as some others: I guess it's worth examining the university regulations and before you hand it in decide how to play it.
After submission of your work, you can just put it on a web site or even better put in an open access platform either of your university or if it does not have such platform in one of the public OA platforms. However, it depends on the country in their you live if you can do so. I have heard that in the US the publications are property of the university (that might be wrong). In Germany the work is your and so you can do with it what you want.
So first make sure that you own the work. Then check out Creative Commons web-site to find the right license.
I've never seen this arrangement, although I have seen somewhat similar situations. While it's true that sometimes things derived out of the thesis might be patentable or held confidential for a period of time, or that a university is granted an automatic license to use anything derived from it, or that parts of the thesis might have copyrights belonging to other companies (e.g., data owned by a company that is allowed to be used), it IS primarily the student's work and in every thesis I've ever seen it is the student that holds the copyright on the majority and the thesis is eventually a publicly-accessible document. What you describe is a little different because there is a direct corporate partnership. It does make sense that in such an arrangement the company might be able to exercise greater control as part of the bargain, such as requesting a time during which the thesis is "protected"/held confidential, but that is supposed to expire eventually. Otherwise it compromises the educational principle that other people should be able to learn from prior work and potentially evaluate its validity for themselves, and the principle that a student can present their work publicly. Neither a student nor their supervisor should agree to the level of control you have described.
I've had students work with multi-million-dollar confidential, commercial datasets in their thesis work. They had to get permission from the company to use the data, the company had to agree to the way that excerpts of the data were used in the thesis, the instances of the company data in the thesis had to be clearly marked as being under the company's copyright, but the rest of the thesis was the student's. We could have held it "protected" for 5 years, if I recall correctly, but it wasn't necessary because the company had already approved the use of the data that we showed and the way that we showed it. The company understood from the start that the student had to be able to present something publicly, otherwise what's the point of having an evaluation that only a secret few can see, or research that can't be presented in conferences or papers? I would have said "no thank you" from the start if a company had that expectation.
It's wrong for a student to not be able to present their work. Really wrong. Like, "abdication of responsibly" wrong for a supervisor to agree to it. How are students supposed to go on to subsequent work (say, graduate studies) if they can't show anybody what they did?
Compatible with your Universities requirements at least. Dont publish it before you hand it in.
Before proceeding, Please check you are the copyright owner. IANAL and IIRC, by default these papers' copyright goes to the school , not the student.
I would not consider research that "builds on" other research to be a derivative work.
A derivative work would be if I took his paper and rewrote parts of it, or added some things, removed bits, etc.
Because you can sign away your rights for any consideration, such consideration might be the "granting of a degree"?
You might be the author and hold copyright, but not "own" the distribution rights, because other people contributed in some way to the work (providing lab space, editing assistance, experimental subjects or materials). This is similar to being contracted to develop software for a business. The software may incorporate trade secrets or you might have needed access to the business to do the development.
This is a very sticky area. What about homework? turnitin.com requires that you grant them a limited license of your copyright for their nefarious purposes.
You're right, it makes a lot more sense to ask a question to a bunch of people not involved, and get a wide variety of answers, some of which may be contradictory and none of which comes with any guarantee of being at all applicable to the situation.
And next we'll ask /.-ers for relationship advice, because spending 5 minutes to ask many people associated with or well-versed in all sorts of relationship issues makes more sense than talking to your S.O.
The OP mentioned that getting copies of dissertations is difficult. Let me provide some more background on the problem.
First, the copyright is not the issue so much as the language concerning copying and distribution of the dissertation.University libraries almost always have copies of dissertations (theses are different), but the lack of clear language or law regarding copies makes them extremely reluctant to copy them.
Even if they will make arrangements for duplication there are often other hurdles. Most universities use ProQuest (UMI) who microfilms and sells copies for ~$50. Unfortunately, these are extremely low quality black and white reproductions that are often unsuitable for research. Often I end up having to order a copy from ProQuest, then go back to the university and ask them to make better copies of all the images and plates.
Universities that do not use ProQuest have a large range of policies. Some will simply not make copies (Stanford). Others will make copies only after getting permission in writing from the author (University of Michigan). Still others will make copies, but only at a high cost (~$1100 in one case from a certain public university in Colorado).
Finally, there are some cases where the university will neither copy or lend a dissertation, so your only option is to travel there to read it.
Feel free to reply if you have any questions about the process as I have learned far more about it than I ever wanted to.
It's also important to mention that this hypothetical professor which can give legal advice won't care about your problem, will have no time to work on it and will refuse you to give you binding legal advice (i.e., put his ass on the line).
Some Universities require a specific statement as below, signed on the page after your title page. This is so that your library can give out scans from your thesis if they request it. Otherwise, since you own the copyright, they should in theory ask you. In practice this largely depends on the library's traditions.
If there is something publishable in your thesis then publish it. If there is something patentable then patent it. Otherwise, post it online.
Congratulations in wrapping up your MS!
-Sam, PhD (posted anonymously because I'm too lazy to log in).
Copyright Statement
I, ANONYMOUS COWARD, do hereby grant permission to copy this document, in
whole or in part, for any non-commercial or non-profit purpose. Any other use
of this document requires the written permission of the author.
________________
Anonymous Coward
Look, copyright is NOT an all inclusive thing. That's what fair use is about. Excerpts, properly attributed, are FAIR USE. Why are you even worrying about this stuff? Sounds like you are trying to overcomplicate your life.
Actually at VCU, calculus 1 is a requirement for all degrees aside from art majors.
Check the application you filled out to get into the school. Chances are it contains an assignment of rights to anything you develop while enrolled as a student (both on and off campus, and on the school's dime or your own).
If that's the case, the school owns the copyright to your Thesis.
cause if you do, and use the paper in your thesis, you might loose the copyright to your whole thesis! Happened to me, I can't legally publish my PhD thesis online, because its now owned by the American Chemical Society who explicitly forbids that.
Remember copyright only protects presentation. It doesn't protect ideas or facts. There's nothing in copyright law that could stop someone from "building on" the paper.
I used the WTFPL - Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License for my thesis, as did a friend. It is available here:
http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
Highly recommend it.
http://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/16405
So basically your shit got stolen by corporate thugs who held your education for ransom?
kudos to this dude who still has his nuts where they belong.
Red, you've been on /. for, what, 2.5 years and still haven't figured out that the purpose of the site is to generate discussion?
For example, while I could not care less about the submitter's thesis, not to mention the copyright terms it is released under, I appreciated reading this comment.
So lay down your flamethrower and either contribute something valuable to the topic or move on to whatever holds your interest.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
You don't even have to state the work is copyrighted; copyright notices became optional in the U.S. in 1988 when we became a member of the Berne Union. The only issue is that if you don't have a notice the person who is sued can claim 'innocent infringement' and reduce damages.
Also, the term 'all rights reserved' is completely deprecated. This notice gives special protection under the Buenos Aires Convention, a special copyright convention from around 1912. As of about 1990 every member of the Buenos Aires Convention was also a member of the Berne Union, which doesn't require copyright notices at all, therefore the term 'all rights reserved' is now completely superfluous. (There are very limited technical exceptions regarding when a copyright expires which doesn't apply for most people because copyrights last for life plus many years, either 50 or 70 depending on which country has stayed with the old version of the Berne Convention or the newer version.)
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.