From claire.jones@uk.bp.com Wed Apr 29 08:35:44 2015 Return-Path: Received: from mail1.bemta8.messagelabs.com (mail1.bemta8.messagelabs.com [216.82.243.193]) by large.stanford.edu (8.13.5/8.13.5) with ESMTP id t3TFZh3U009673 for ; Wed, 29 Apr 2015 08:35:44 -0700 Received: from [216.82.241.196] by server-1.bemta-8.messagelabs.com id 5A/ED-29476-B69F0455; Wed, 29 Apr 2015 15:31:55 +0000 X-Env-Sender: claire.jones@uk.bp.com X-Msg-Ref: server-7.tower-46.messagelabs.com!1430321450!39808907!20 X-Originating-IP: [217.150.156.111] X-StarScan-Received: X-StarScan-Version: 6.13.6; banners=-,-,- X-VirusChecked: Checked Received: (qmail 10467 invoked from network); 29 Apr 2015 15:31:47 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO DE36S00FEXC14.dsc.bp.com) (217.150.156.111) by server-7.tower-46.messagelabs.com with AES128-SHA encrypted SMTP; 29 Apr 2015 15:31:47 -0000 Received: from DE36S00FHST10.DSC.BP.COM (129.230.209.55) by tlsmail.bp.com (149.177.125.37) with Microsoft SMTP Server (TLS) id 14.3.195.1; Wed, 29 Apr 2015 17:30:38 +0200 Received: from DE35S00FHST14.DSC.BP.COM ([fe80::59c1:175d:4b13:110c]) by DE36S00FHST10.DSC.BP.COM ([fe80::6cd4:782a:a8a7:e10%25]) with mapi id 14.03.0195.001; Wed, 29 Apr 2015 17:30:23 +0200 From: "Jones, Claire" To: "R. B. Laughlin" Subject: RE: SR Copyright Inquiry Thread-Topic: SR Copyright Inquiry Thread-Index: AdBkttGvDZouoaotTH6iuMh5+G9nXQd1o0UA Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2015 15:30:23 +0000 Message-ID: <88D328EF676ACB40914549E6786861492FE03B91@DE35S00FHST14.DSC.BP.COM> References: <201503221543.t2MFhMT8007530@large.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <201503221543.t2MFhMT8007530@large.stanford.edu> Accept-Language: en-GB, en-US Content-Language: en-US X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: x-originating-ip: [129.230.208.1] Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by large.stanford.edu id t3TFZh3U009673 Status: RO Robert B. Laughlin, Thank you for your email. You are welcome to download copies of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy and reproduce charts, graphs and figures with source attribution. I have checked and we think the re-direction from the 2009 edition of the Review you highlight in your email occurred when we changed our web content management system. Hardcopies of all previous Reviews are available from bp.distributionservices@bp.com. PDF's are available on request (although large in file size). You could also obtain a copy of the 2009 report by using the wayback machine internet archive at http://archive.org/web/ It is worth noting that the reserves, production and consumption tables are revised annually and the latest edition will contain all revisions in the Excel historical data workbook www.bp.com/statisticalreview. Figures are often revised by governments and statistical agencies and we endeavor to improve our data each year when we find improved sources. The 2015 edition will be published in June and I trust you will continue to direct your students to it as an authoritative source of energy statistics. Best regards Claire Jones Claire Jones BP p.l.c Economics Claire.Jones@bp.com BP p.l.c. Registered office: 1 St James's Square, London, SW1Y 4PD. Registered in England and Wales, number 102498. -----Original Message----- From: R. B. Laughlin [mailto:rbl@large.stanford.edu] Sent: 22 March 2015 15:43 To: SR Cc: rbl@large.stanford.edu Subject: SR Copyright Inquiry The Editor BP Statistical Review of World Energy BP p.l.c 1 St. James's Square London SW1Y 4PD UK sr@bp.com Dear Sir, I am writing to ask about copyright issues surrounding the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. If you are not the correct authority on this kind of thing, I'd be grateful if you would direct me to the right office inside the company. Let me identify myself. I am Prof. Robert B. Laughlin at Stanford University. I am co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics. More about me may be found at http://large.stanford.edu I run two courses on energy at Stanford, PH240 and PH241, that involve public-domain writing by students. You may find this writing at the above URL under "Courses" and also by googling. For example, if you google for "ph240 stanford keystone" several items will pop up, including a particularly fine piece on the Keystone XL Pipeline from PH240 in the Fall of 2012 by John Lagasca. If you click on this and then scroll down to the references, you will see that the very first reference in Lagasca's piece is the 2012 issue of the BP Statistical Review. Then, if you click on this reference, you will see that a DOWNLOADED copy PDF of this publication comes up. This is the issue. You may see by clicking around in my archive that students use the BP Statistical Review as their preferred resource for energy facts. This is at my suggestion. I find the BP Review to be exceedingly fine technically, untainted by government politics, and - this is crucial - nonvolatile. What I mean by nonvolatile is that the document is published every year and disseminated in PDF form in a way that cannot later be rescinded or disavowed. As a safety precaution against crashing of the BP servers, you will see that each time a student has referenced the BP Review I have linked the reference to a downloaded copy of the document stored in a subdirectory of the student's piece. Thus, I am effectively re-serving this publication from my computers. Insofar as the document is nonvolatile and always served from BP anyway, this is scarcely a copyright violation. The student's statement of fact is in this way doubly protected against later becoming wrong. The reason I am writing to you is this: It just now came to my attention that the 2009 edition of the BP Statistical Review has "disappeared" from the Internet. When I discovered this I was quite shocked, for I remembered having seen an archive of past editions of the document at the BP web site. But I cannot find this archive now. I also could not find a copy of the 2009 edition anywhere except Scribd, and I'm not quite sure about the legal status of that. The links to the 2009 edition at BP that I found by googling all redirected me to the 2014 edition. It is 100% clear that the computer staff at BP has tampered with the URL, causing it to redirect and, in effect, make the 2009 edition vanish. I then checked around on the BP web site for the copyright policy and found, to my horror, language that suggests I should not be downloading copies of the BP Statistical Review and re-serving them from my own computers, as I am now doing. I cannot overstate the seriousness of this development. Up until this moment, the BP Statistical Review had been the gold standard of energy facts for me. I had always directed students there if they wanted to know whether something was true or not. But, if BP has, in fact, made the 2009 issue disappear, then the BP Statistical is not a gold standard at all but simply just the usual volatile advertising trash you find on the Internet - not worth the paper it's written on. I must not only tell students not to trust what's written in it, I must actually FORBID them from using it as a reference in their work because it is volatile. Thus, I am writing to you for clarification. First of all, I would like someone in authority at BP to look at the practice in my student reports of attaching a downloaded a copy of the BP Statistical Review (for the year n question) and tell me if this violates BP copyright policy. If the answer is that it does, then I would like to further request that BP grant me a formal exception to the policy in writing. The practice of using copyright to enable public statements to be unsaid is used commonly by continental European energy institutions such as the IAEA. It is a nefarious tactic I call the "non-publication publication". They disseminate what looks like a witnessed document, but then they forbid by law that anyone should show the document to third parties electronically. This practice enables them to retract any statement they make any time in the future it becomes becomes politically convenient. If anybody tries to prove they were liars by showing a downloaded version of the document, they cry "copyright violation." A large fraction of the IAEA document portfolio is banned as reference material in my course for this reason. Thus far, the BP Statistical Review has been a rock solid anglo-saxon publication that people don't tamper with post facto and that I therefore have trusted and recommended to students as the premier source of energy facts in the world - vastly better than any government publication. However, if it is now BP policy to "disappear" past documents and to disallow copying and electronic witnessing of them to assure non-volatility, then that will change. Thank you in advance for your time. Respectfull yours, Robert B. Laughlin Professor of Physics