David Suzuki - "Take my research, please"

A very tangential connection to an earlier post about short vs full RSS feeds, prompted in part by Rachel's comment on the earlier post, BoingBoing discusses politicians' recent co-opting of environmental research conducted by the David Suzuki Foundation, with apparent lack of adequate attribution or acknowledgment of the source.

David Suzuki comments on the incident in a recent article, "Take my research, please" --

"Allow me to clear something up right now. To all politicians looking for ways to reduce our footprint on nature – or, to use politician-speak, create an “environmental platform”: Knock yourselves out. Feel free to steal, pilfer, borrow, rent, filch or otherwise take any research my foundation does and put it to good use.

This may seem obvious to some, but the whole point of conducting and publishing this research is to get people to actually use it. As public education, it helps raise awareness of environmental problems. But more important, it provides solutions to those problems. And most of those solutions are best implemented by our political and business leaders, rather than by individuals."

I saw David Suzuki lecture several years ago at a Medical Library Association annual meeting and he's a fantastic and inspiring speaker about environmental issues.

A few clips:
- featured on this episode of Listen Up with Lorna Dueck #278 - Environmental Action
- the David Suzuki Nature Challenge
- World Wildlife Fund Australia interview with Dr. Suzuki
- and more available via a quick youtube search

British Library announces intellectual property manifesto

Today at the Labour Party Conference in the UK, the British Library launched their "manifesto," including intellectual property recommendations:

- "Existing limitations and exceptions to copyright law should be extended to encompass unambiguously the digital environment;
- Licenses providing access to digital material should not undermine longstanding limitations and exceptions such as ‘fair dealing'
- The right to copy material for preservation purposes – a core duty of all national libraries – should be extended to all copyrightable works;
- The copyright term for sound recordings should not be extended without empirical evidence of the benefits and due consideration of the needs of society as a whole;
- The US model for dealing with ‘orphan works' should be considered for the UK;
The length of copyright term for unpublished works should be brought into line with other terms (ie: life plus 70 years)."

Links:
- British Library press release
- full text of intellectual property manifesto (PDF)

Commentary:
- Nate Anderson of Ars Technica: "British Library issues copyright manifesto" - "The British Library has the Magna Carta, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, but it's still not happy. Why not? Because it has the intellectual property blues."
- ZDNet UK: quoting Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, "Unless there is a serious updating of copyright law to recognize the changing technological environment, the law becomes an ass."