Thank you George, Professor Dominik Wujastyk, Richard Mahoney for your response.

It’s interesting that there’s no similar complaint from anyone else! Mine must be so special that the hawky-Google can’t take its eyes off me!!!

I do have the copyright as you can see from the attached picture.

The original thesis is kept at UofPenn and microfilm copies were available from UMI, Ann Arbor for a minimal fee. A couple of years ago some other establishment started distributing PDF versions, I believe. Now Google.

I don’t understand how they can completely ignore the author in all this! I’m very tempted to go to Google head quarters which is close-by and have a talk with the big guys.

So, ok, I’ll send a written letter first to UMI and start from there.

Thanks and regards,

rajam

On Oct 20, 2016, at 1:04 PM, Richard Mahoney <rmahoney@fastmail.com> wrote:

Dear Rajam,

Sometimes the varsity research repository provides details on rights,
e.g.:

UC Digital Theses - Copyright Provisions
http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml


Best, Richard



On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 13:33:33 -0600
Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com> wrote:

​Copyright is a sneaky creature.  It's likely that you own the
copyright of your thesis, but not certain.  If you received a
financial grant ​during the time you wrote it, then it might be "work
for hire" and the grant body might own the copyright.  Or the
university might own the copyright. That's quite likely, in fact.
Technically, universities own the copyright of all work written by
any of their employees, including professors.  Most universities
ignore this fact; the more legally-aware one's have a
copyright-waiver in their employment terms somewhere.   Most
universities also require students to deposit a copy of their theses
with the university, physically or as a PDF; that too may involve a
transfer of rights.  So, it's possible that a university has the
copyright to your thesis, in which case, they also have the right to
give Google permission to copy it.

I have written to ScribD in the past, asking them to take down dozens
of my articles that had been reproduced there.  The process was a bit
time-consuming, but ScribD did comply eventually and the illegal
copies diasappeared.

I'm sure you can write to Google and ask them to take down your
thesis.

Best,


--
Professor Dominik Wujastyk*
<http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk> Singhmar Chair in
Classical Indian Society and Polity Department of History and
Classics <http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/> University of
Alberta, Canada

<https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/goog_1525257691>
​sas.ualberta.ca​


On 19 October 2016 at 19:46, rajam <rajam@earthlink.net> wrote:

I don’t understand the protocol of Google Books.

Recently, I came to know that Google Books have PDF-ed my Ph.D.
thesis and publicized it.

I was shocked to know about it.

1. What happened to the copyright to the author, me in this case?

2. Authors may have plans to revise their graduate-level theses and
improve on them before bringing them to the public. To grab such
effort in the middle is like collapsing a quiche in the making or
thwarting a fetus’ growth. Absolutely unacceptable.

Has something like this happened to anyone of our colleagues?
Please let me know how to teach Google Books to follow scholarly
norms.

Thanks and regards,
rajam

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--
Richard Mahoney | Indica et Buddhica

Littledene  Bay Road  Oxford  New Zealand
+64-3-312-1699  r.mahoney@indica-et-buddhica.org
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