When submitting to eCommons, you retain copyright in your work. Electronic copies of dissertations in PQDT or eCommons may be made accessible immediately upon submission or after an embargo period of six months, one year, or two years. Your decision should be made in consultation with your special committee. Authors may request proper attribution, permit copying and the creation of derivative works, request that others share derivative works under the same terms, and allow or disallow commercial uses.
Authors may even choose to place their works directly into the public domain. You will have the option of selecting a Creative Commons license when you upload your dissertation or thesis to ProQuest, and your choice will automatically be applied to the copy of your work in eCommons. Cornell University Policy 1. Theses and dissertations describing patentable research should be withheld from publication, in order to avoid premature public disclosure.
Copyright law involves many complex issues that are relevant to you as a graduate student, both in protecting your own work and in referencing the work of others. Discussion of copyright in this publication is not meant to substitute for the legal advice of qualified attorneys. Copyright protection automatically exists from the time the work is created in fixed form and the copyright immediately becomes the property of the author.
Registration with the United States Copyright Office is not required to secure copyright; rather it is a legal formality to place on public record the basic facts of a particular copyright. Even if you do register the copyright, you can still make the work available under a permissive license, such as a Creative Commons license. See Is Creative Commons against copyright? For example, with CC-BY-NC you can choose to allow most non-commercial uses of your work as long as it is attributed to you, but still prohibit others from selling your thesis as an expensive book on Amazon.
You mentioned that you want to "let people use my work and cite me appropriately. Even if you reserve all rights under copyright, people are still free to use the ideas in your thesis. Copyright only protects your expression of your ideas, i. So copyright prohibits people from copying large parts of your thesis verbatim into their own, or from posting copies of your thesis on another website unless you choose to allow those things by assigning a permissive license to the work , but not from building on your work and citing you.
See Does copyright protect the author's creative ideas? You wrote "a thesis should not be copyrighted simply because I think of it as an extended paper.
Improve this answer. Thanks for your great and detailed answer! It was enlightening. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Related Hot Network Questions. However, despite these benefits, many works are never registered because registration takes time and money. Registering a copyright is not difficult.
For instructions and forms, visit the US Copyright Office website. If you have any questions regarding copyright registration, the US Copyright Office has a toll-free help line at You may register a work at any time while it is still in copyright.
Registration costs can vary depending on the type of work and whether or not you are the sole author. The U. Copyright Office's Circular 4 has the most up to date information about registration fees. If you submit your dissertation to ProQuest , they will register the copyright on your behalf, for a fee. The Rackham Graduate School encourages Ph. Under US law, the initial copyright holder is the author of the work. In most cases, copyright law treats the creator s of the work as the author s.
Copyright is automatic; it applies to the work as soon as it is fixed or recorded in some way. If multiple people created the work, only those who have contributed copyrightable elements are considered authors for the purpose of copyright law. Coming up with the idea for the work alone is not enough to be an author. See Works Made for Hire for more information on when a work is considered a work made for hire. A University of Michigan dissertation author is the initial copyright holder for her dissertation.
As the copyright holder, she has certain rights under copyright law.
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