[FC-discuss] Free Thesis Project Released Today

[Crosbie Fitch]

> From: rob at robmyers.org
> Well they may be restricted by publication requirements or college  
> policy. But if not then this is indefensible.

It's indefensible ANYWAY. It's indefensible for a university to interfere
with the ability of its students to disseminate their discoveries,
creations, research, and knowledge to the public (their peers today and
tomorrow).

It used to be the case that the university had a hard time trying to
persuade students to PUBLISH their discoveries and knowledge for the benefit
of mankind rather than to hoard them for themselves.

And now we find that the universities have become corrupted to hoard their
students' work in precisely the way they had previously admonished*.

It's bad enough that students are overly policed in their exploration and
exchange of popular culture, but when they are even policed against
publishing their own work, then this is tantamount to indentured employment.

Time for students to assert (not merely plead for) ownership of their own
work sufficient to dedicate it to the public.



*  It may once have been the case that a university felt it had to
confiscate the commercial privileges that copyright and patent might grant
to students - in order to ensure the student didn't, in the process of
exploiting them, impair the dissemination of their work. Unfortunately, it
seems that universities have inevitably corrupted this philanthropic motive
into a selfish one - the more wealthy the university, the more economically
self-sufficient it becomes (through commercial exploitation of its scholars'
and students' work), presumably it argues, the better its contribution to
science and the arts?