The other evening my wife Googled my name just to see what would come up, and boy did we get surprised! My doctoral dissertation which I wrote for my Ph.D. in Comparative Arts at Ohio University in 1975 but never published, it seems, is for sale on Amazon! Its bogus "Reviews" even claim to reveal its ISBN number!
Even more amazing to us was that it has been reviewed on Amazon by at least two bogus "Customer Reviews" by "readers" who claim to have received it as a gift and praise it highly as being "very attractive" and "cool." They go on to say, in broken English and computer-generated generalizations, how happy it made them to receive it as a gift and read it, and they each highly recommend it to their friends.
I'd surely like to know how they got it, since the only copy I know of is buried unbound in a cardboard box in my closet here at home. When I wrote my study, The Aesthetic of the Veil: Conceptual Correspondences in the Nocturnes of Whistler and Debussy in 1975, I had to submit a copy to the department of my Comparative Arts major and another to the Ohio University Library. I was also required to submit a brief abstract of it to Dissertation Abstracts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the national repository of doctoral abstracts. Outside of those places, to my knowledge no other copies have ever existed. I guess I'd better put a better lock on my closet!
As Barb and I pursued the two Google pages of seventeen references to this work, apparently now offered for sale without any knowledge or consent on my part, we learned on the Amazon listing that it was "not currently available", but could be ordered as an e-book. No price was given. It even included a selectable question asking if I was the owner or author of this work, and inviting me to relinquish digital permissions to publish it online as an e-book. Further, it had been cross-listed on Classical Music and Classical Art sites and offered for sale at Lowcost Books.com and Classical Music Books in the UK. One of their pages invites readers from the UK, US, Canada, Germany, or France to order it by clicking their country's flag. An attractive Editorial Review of the work by title and subtitle is set up also but not written--not yet, at least. I guess the theatre critic left the play before the murder in the third act. I didn't realize I was such an internationally known author! All this, it appears, was set up for marketing my thesis without anyone bothering to contact me or seek permissions or make any offer of publication.
This is marketing without product of the most flagrant piracy, I feel. My dissertation is featured by title on attractively-illustrated advertising pages on a number of sites along with many books and recordings, and it's never even been published or reviewed. The fake reviews Amazon included, I strongly suspect, were computer-generated and totally bogus. If I were among the affluent, which I am not, I'd sue their socks off, even though I suspect they've got themselves covered legally somehow.
I don't think I'm alone in this theft of intellectual property. I suspect all the dissertations which we doctoral candidates labored over for years to get our Ph.D.'s are probably already pillaged and pilfered by the e-pirates who are hyping them in their sites all over the place without our knowledge or benefit, and if someone actually orders one, they may or may not be able to cob a pirated copy to sell them. Since I wrote it in 1975, any copy rights I may have had have probably expired, which may be why that dissertation of mine is now getting the royal Times Square treatment in lights.
I don't know how my work ended up on Amazon, but I'm pretty certain of one thing: if it ever gets sold, I won't see a dime of it. And to the bogus "reviewers" who concocted those lame comments, I have only this to offer: at least I didn't plagiarize my dissertation; I wrote it myself.
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4 comments:
Golly, that's weird. Can someone really make money off your work?
it doesn't look like you can actually purchase a product yet, but it is very strange that amazon.com has your thesis.
As I was commencing to write my master's thesis, I was informed by my university's English department that all masters' theses and doctoral dissertations were to be kept in hard-copy form in the department's library. I was also asked to provide either an electronic form of the thesis to be kept by the department or to pay a $50 fee to have my thesis transcribed into electronic form by a third-party company whose name I can't remember.
If I remember correctly, said third-party company was also getting paid by the department to transcribe all of the theses and dissertations from the decades before the electronic age.
My guess is that this company, or one like it, got to transcribe all of the old dissertations from Ohio University, including yours. It probably is indeed now possible to buy your dissertation from Amazon. As for the reviews, probably some hacks are paid to glance through the gazillion theses and dissertations and come up with some platitudes for the benefit of shoppers looking for reviews.
Whether it's actually piracy depends on what rights to your dissertation you might have signed away in the process of submitting all of the paperwork involved in completing your degree. If you signed the rights over to the university, the university will get the royalties.
Interestingly, my dad has actually received two inquiries about the PhD dissertation he wrote at Cal Tech in the early 1960s, from PhD candidates who wanted to expand upon the research he did (although both inquiries were some years ago and probably before this electronic archiving). He was flattered to find out that someone, somewhere, had actually read the thing and that it wasn't gathering dust in some basement.
By the way, you won't find my thesis online, because I never got around to finishing it.
But if you're willing to subsidize some repairs of Carol Anne's boat, I might be able to sneak a draft of Carol Anne's unfinished thesis off her computer. (grin)
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