What about the dissertations?
As people consider the Google Book Search settlement proposal in increasing depth, more and more questions seem to crop up. Some of them do not have simple answers. Today, a colleague from a law school asked me whether dissertations would be considered as “Books” under the terms of the settlement. Good question.
I am most definitely not an expert on dissertations: I’ve always shied as far away as possible from discussions relating to ETD programs. In the context of the settlement, their presence had not really occurred to me. As someone suggested, this is probably just one of hundreds of cases of some consequence that were never explicitly thought about.
So what about dissertations? Are they covered under the settlement? The answer might be “yes” — at least, much of the time. Let’s turn quickly to the “Book” definition in the Settlement, §1.16:
“Book” means a written or printed work that (a) if a “United States work,” as defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101, has been registered with the United States Copyright Office as of the Notice Commencement Date, (b) on or before the Notice Commencement Date, was published or distributed to the public or made available for public access as a set of written or printed sheets of paper bound together in hard copy form under the authorization of the work’s U.S. copyright owner, and (c) as of the Notice Commencement Date, is subject to a Copyright Interest.
The quick consensus from those that I asked is that dissertations are usually considered “publications”, particularly if one assumes that UMI services satisfy the condition of public distribution. Proquest states:
ProQuest UMI Dissertation Publishing has been publishing dissertations and theses since 1938. In that time, we have published over 2 million graduate works from graduate schools around the world. We have over 700 active university publishing partners, and publish more than 70,000 new graduate works each year.
A 2000 CNI taskforce update [PDF] by the Library of Congress, discussing digital deposit of dissertations, observes:
Each year, UMI Dissertations Publishing receives over 40,000 U.S. Ph.D. dissertations and Masters’ theses for publication. As part of its services, UMI provides copyright registration through the U.S. Copyright Office for those authors desiring registration. An average of 17,000 to 20,000 authors take advantage of this service each year, making UMI the largest single contributor of copyright registration applications to the U.S. Copyright Office.
Registration is not necessary to secure copyright, but it does offer certain protections; in the settlement context, it is required to meet the definition of “Book”. Regardless of the initial registration, one would expect that at least those published up until 1963 are Public Domain (with no subsequent renewal of copyright), but they would have to be claimed as such by Google as Public Domain Works (See §3.1 Identification, Digitization and Use of Books. “Google shall identify to the Registry books that it has determined to be Public Domain Books pursuant to the process set forth in Attachment E (Public Domain) and for which Google wants the safe harbor described in Section 3.2(d)(v)(3) (Safe Harbor). For each such book, Google shall provide the supporting reasons and information that Attachment E (Public Domain) requires.”)
Some additional number of these dissertations may simply not be available (they might be withheld from public consultation for a variety of reasons). One would not necessarily know that by looking at thesis documentation, but they would not be part of the settlement presumably.
One also has to wonder if dissertations are “Commercially Available”. Those that are available through print on demand only, might not be so classified. (See §4.7 New Revenue Models. “POD copies of Books distributed by third parties. A Book’s availability through such POD program would not, in and of itself, result in the Book being classified as Commercially Available.”). However, many dissertations are available through the licensed Dissertation Abstracts service, but Google would have no way of knowing a priori which dissertations were available, unless they subscribed to the service.
There are probably many other convolutions, but I must turn to my readers for help and clarification.
Tags: copyright, dissertations, Google Book Search, Publishing
