Copyrighting dissertations?

So I'm performing all the piddly tasks attendant to filing while I wait for word of signatures when I come across this:

You may choose to copyright your manuscript by including the copyright notice but not formally registering your copyright. However, to fully protect your rights in a copyright dispute and to be eligible for damages caused by infringement, you must register your copyright. You can register your copyright at any time within its term.

If you are submitting a Ph.D. dissertation, you may have the copyright registered for you by UMI Dissertation Services (a division of ProQuest Information and Learning Company). To do this, submit the UMI form and required fee (certified check or money order—UMI does not accept personal checks) to the University Archives when you submit your manuscript. UMI will register your copyright and submit your manuscript to the Library of Congress.

I'm no copyright lawyer—nor do I understand commonplace copyright law all that well—but it seems excessive to have to pay someone else a fee to secure the rights to my own dissertation.  I'm inclined to slap a Creative Commons license requiring attribution, noncommmerical use, no derivatives and share alike and not pay anyone anything. 

I'm not about to Doctorow the thing—no one's likely to translate my dissertation into Romanian—but I'm fairly certain free copyright protection is better than expensive copyright protection.  Were I in the sciences and my research might one day mint some pharmaceutical company a forture I could see doing it.  But in the humanities?  Is it really necessary?  In other words:

Is my Jew showing or am I just being practical?

Comments

[Karl Steel]

Dude, you don't want to give anyone a check: you know they'll accidentally read it as $10,000, spend it on library fines, and bill you 5 years down the line for unpaid copyright fees, with interest.

I'm just saying.

[Gary]

I'm not a copyright lawyer, either, and I might be wrong in what follows, as it consists of the remains of an intellectual property law school class from four or five years ago.

Disclaimer aside, you don't actually have to register your copyright to have copyright protection. Copyright exists upon creation of a work in some fixed form, and registration basically serves to allow you to seek damages that aren't available in the absence of registration. In addition, I'm not sure that you really need someone else to do it for you. I think you can register online through the US Copyright Office for $40 or $50. It's not a terribly expensive process, and I don't think it's difficult, either.

[Ahistoricality]

Is my Jew showing

Excuse me?

[SEK]

Excuse me?

I've got it schwartzes.

Thank you, thank you, I'll be racist all week. (No I won't. Also, thanks to Gary, but not so much to Karl, as I don't need to be pre-reminded of what will inevitably go wrong come Monday.)

[N. Pepperell]

Hey Scott - no lawyer here, obviously, but... This is a bit anachronistic, from the sound of it... First, since around 1990, from memory, you have copyright even in absence of the use of the formal copyright symbol. Sticking on the symbol, and obviously sticking on something like a CC license, clarifies the terms, but is no longer (I think - again, remembering the 'no lawyer' bit...) a statutory requirement in the US.

Second: you have full copyright in your work, regardless of whether you do a formal registration process, or even whether you provide a copyright notice visible on the work itself. Formal registration, if I understand correctly (and obviously I might not...) basically deprives someone of the ability to say "Oops! I didn't realise..." etc. This can have some implications for their the sorts of monetary damages that might be imposable in a dispute.

Third: if you do want to register your copyright, you don't have to go through some odd group your university has nominated. You should be able to do this yourself through the US Copyright Office - I think you can do this online these days - there will be a fee, but presumably this wouldn't be higher than whatever this strange third party is, to which your university is referring you.

All up, I find your university's advice weird... :-) (Oh, and... congratulations, by the way, on getting to the point that it's something like this that you are worrying about :-) )

Take care...

[Sisyphus]

Ok, yes, and all that, but what worries me is that unless you do something special, ProQuest will make the dissertation available through "third-party" sites like google scholar --- and I've seen them available for printing on Amazon. What effect will this have on trying to get the diss. published? Or could it harm the tenure file (knock wood!) if it can get downloaded/published through Amazon e-printing? No one has any good answers for me on this...

[Adam Roberts]

This has the whiff of scam to me. You don't have to register, or pay for, the copyright you hold over your work. That's just there. The Berne Convention (to which the US is a signatory) says "Under the Convention, copyrights for creative works are automatically in force upon their creation without being asserted or declared. An author need not 'register' or 'apply for' a copyright in countries adhering to the Convention. As soon as a work is 'fixed', that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work and to any derivative works, unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them or until the copyright expires."

[Adam Roberts]

OK: I've looked a little deeper (I know a fair bit about UK copyright, since it's one of the things I teach our CW undergrads, but the US is a different matter). The infallible legal authority that is wikipedia, though, says:

"While copyright in the United States automatically attaches upon the creation of an original work of authorship, registration with the Copyright Office puts a copyright holder in a better position if litigation arises over the copyright. A copyright holder desiring to register his or her copyright should do the following:

1.Obtain and complete appropriate form.
2.Prepare clear rendition of material being submitted for copyright
3.Send both documents to U.S. Copyright Office in Washington, D.C.

Registration of copyright refers to the act of registering the work with the United States Copyright Office, which is an office of the Library of Congress. As the United States has joined the Berne Convention, registration is no longer necessary to provide copyright protection. However, registration is still necessary to obtain statutory damages in case of infringement."

So I guess it's a question of how likely you think it somebody will infringe your copyright, and how you feel about statutory damages.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Adding to the chorus of amateur, untrustworthy advice by non-lawyers, Adam's comment above seems right to me, but "statutory damages" was once explained to me as depending on whether the infringer had actually made money off of selling your work. Unless you anticipate that someone is going to make a profit off of selling your diss, you're not likely to get damages. You can make someone stop using it (with appropriate legal action etc.), but you could do that with any copyright, including the kind that you inherently have even without a copyright notice.

[John Emerson]

As I understand, someone above you in the University hierarchy owns everything you write, and will be doing you a favor if he plagiarizes it without acknowledgment.

[Miriam]

What effect will this have on trying to get the diss. published?

But since you can already buy them through UMI (she says, having just shelled out $41 for one), doesn't this situation already apply? Google Scholar/Amazon might make it easier to buy/read a dissertation, but they wouldn't be pioneering in the field...

Honestly, does anyone read a dissertation unless they positively must? (Or, as the late Al Wlecke once reminded himself, "You know, Al, nobody's going to read this thing." A great cure for writer's block, apparently.)

[John Emerson]

I've photocopied about a half dozen unpublished dissertations, and I've carefully read at least two of them. So beware!

[Brennen]

Honestly, does anyone read a dissertation unless they positively must?

and

I've photocopied about a half dozen unpublished dissertations, and I've carefully read at least two of them. So beware!

Weirdly or not, I kind of want to read this one, but it's possible that a (very) brief stint in academic publishing as peon-who-photocopies-and-sometimes-reads manuscripts did me some considerable lasting damage.