CONTACT YOUR UNIVERSITY (Score 1)

The most obvious course of action, if your thesis is being offered for sale without your permission and you feel aggrieved over it, is to first contact your thesis advisor and through him or her, your university's legal department. When you notify them, of course it makes sense to have done a search of Contentville's database so you can tell them how many of the university's theses are being offered for sale. Also, the university's legal staff can clarify your actual IP position. I think that NBC, CBS will be more likely to stand up and take notice when they get nasty letters from the legal departments of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, The University of Chicago, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, U. Michigan and..."perhaps Cornell." More likely than if they just get e-mails from a few ex-academics who are now computer programmers. My belief is that if they wants to provide information about theses on their database, they should be referring the queries to the university libraries, who, if the demand is there, can get permission from the faculty and students in question to make high-quality reprints of the thesis through the university press, or provide the information requested through their own (typically rather elaborate) web sites. My concern is that bad University Microforms reprints will be going out, and the quality of reproduction is utter crap. Only I have the TeX and PostScript source, and original figures of my thesis (The Nonlinear Dynamics of Thermal Convection, The University of Chicago, 1990). Quite frankly, I do not want bad reproductions of my thesis being distributed. Scholars know to expect bad reproduction quality when they order theses from University Microforms, but your mass market is going to be quite contemptuous of university research when they purchase something like that sight unseen, and find they've gotten an illegible pig in a poke. So, it's really the universitys' prestige that's threatened by pirate operations like these contentvillians. The universitys therefore have a vested interest in controlling the quality of the presentation of their scholarly productions, as well as making sure these reproductions are being used for scholarly purposes -- rather than to make the bucks on the IP which the university, the faculty member and the student should equitably share.