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Canada's Conference Board Found Plagiarizing Copyright Report
An anonymous reader writes "There is a storm
brewing in Canada as the prestigious Conference Board of Canada has
been caught
plagiarizing US copyright lobby group documents in a report on copyright
reform. The report was funded by the Canadian copyright lobby as
well as by the Ontario government. The Conference Board has acknowledged
some errors, but stands by the report, while the Ontario government admits
spending thousands of dollars and it now wants some answers."
Those quotes were stolen from our hardworking corporate lobbyists without acquiring the relevant content licenses and now it's time to exact a settlement from the Canadians.
Once again, the copyright lobbyists are eating themselves like an ouroboros lawyer. Are they going to hire Lars Ulrich to explain us why it's alright to pirate your own work when you've been so adamant about suing the pants off everyone else?
... the definition of irony :)
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
"...some of the cited paragraphs closely approximate the wording of a source document."
Closely approximate???!! Hell, they're word-for-word copies right down to the bullet points. They are not in quotations so they aren't really citations.
This really makes me sad because it shows an external corporate influence in Canada's affairs that would have Americans screaming if the reverse was true.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
You didn't expect them to actually work for their money, did you? Here's the way these things work: the government pays a lot of money to an organization for policy "consulting", so they can have a report which recommends doing what the lobbyists wanted them to do in the first place.
The report is a foregone conclusion. The $15,000 is spent to passing the blame, not on any actual work, and for a politician, it's money well spent. You can't really blame the conference board for plagiarizing their report, usually nobody bothers reading those things anyway.
It's great work if you can get it. You get to sit around, getting paid to accept blame for public policy. Except since you're just a private individual, there's no actual responsibility or consequences involved. Meanwhile, the politicians can point at you, defusing any potential scandal by claiming they're just doing as was recommended by the "experts" and if they made a mistake, well it was well intentioned and they did their best.
This is the reason why we have to have very close fact-checking standards for legal and academic publishing. It's quite possible that if someone hadn't truly caught this then someone would be quoting this material as reliable information. It's actually quite frightening when you consider how much "reliable" material is out there that truly has basis neither in fact nor reality.
I like losing arguments, it just means that I can take your point and make it my own.
"...some of the binary files on my hard drive closely approximate the sound of a copyrighted song."
Hey, after all, MP3 is lossy ...
What is wrong with you people? If someone said "I hate Iranians" and "I hate the French", everyone would be in an uproar.
But you bash Canadians and Americans and it's entirely OK? Eat shit, hypocrite.
Read it again.
Americans would scream (yes, the 'e' is there) if Canadian corporate interests interfered with US internal matters.
The reality, of course, is that they do as does corporations from all over the world. Suitable screaming thus ensues but nothing is really done.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
This is the kind of crap that results from a casual disregard for plagiarism in schools. It's awful here in the states, and I imagine just as bad in Canada. Copying that freshman assignment leads to copying conference reports later on in life. Any form of plagiarism is corrosive to real progress.
It's a problem when a government pays for a report from an uninterested third party, and gets a quickie rewrite of a pressure-group's screed. And a dishonest one at that.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Poutine.
Posting anon since I don't want to take the karma hit for flaming.
You sir, are a gigantic flaming asshole. We've lost over 100 soldiers in Afghanistan fighting a war that you started and left for us to clean up. So go fuck yourself sideways with a rake.
To be fair they only got their independence from the UK in 1982.
Hockey is our national sport.
Actually, it's Lacrosse.
Frankly, the point still stands. Perhaps even better.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
There's nothing strange about it. You can have my country as a "territory" when you pry it from my cold dead hands, because I will always be a Canadian.
I find it strange that any citizen with a choice chooses to live in a country that has a death penalty, a history of drafts in offensive war time, and a gun lobby that's so powerful it scares politicians.
If it were me, I'd have gotten the hell out as soon as Reagan was elected. (If Harper ever gets a majority up here I may well try to flee as well...)
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
Afghanistan was a cesspool that generated terrorists, and had a government that oppressed and routinely terrorized it's own people, and was the breeding and operational ground for the 9/11 attacks. It's only slightly better now, but it is better. On the other hand, Iraq was just Bush being an idiotic, imperialist douche riding the anti-Muslim wave. Very different countries, very different wars.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
"breeding and operational ground for the 9/11 attacks"
You mean the White House Right?
"Socialist pablum?" Dude, put the Fox News down before you hurt yourself.
Also, "bare arms" = short sleeves. I am exercising my right to bare arms at this very moment. You probably meant "bear arms", aka "carry arms". While it's not in the Canadian constitution, there are plenty of guns in Canada and you know it.
While we're at it, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms most certainly includes freedom of speech and religion. And I personally criticize the shit out of my municipal, provincial and federal governments on a regular (and public) basis. And I do so safe in the knowledge that they can't do a THING to me in retaliation. Jesus, did you sleep through grade 10 civics?
All things considered (seriously, you plan to "blow the head off some daft politician"?!?), I'd encourage you to apply for US citizenship as soon as you're able. I hear the Appalachians are lovely this time of year.
Politicians are, for the most part, cowards.
Assassinations are wonderfully effective vehicles for change IF there is sufficient civil unrest.
A single bullet started WW I.
There are four boxes used to maintain liberty: soap, jury, ballot, and lastly, ammo. Emphasis on lastly.
In Liberty, Rene
Sucrose, the sugar from sugar cane and sugar beets, is a dimer of a glucose and a fructose molecule joined in a 1->2-glycosidic bond.
The sucrose disaccharide is cleaved in the saliva and in the upper gut by beta-fructosidase, which catalyses the hydrolysis into glucose and fructose.
No sucrose crosses into the blood stream; it is turned into 50% glucose and 50% fructose by molecule count no later than the brush border of the intestinal epithelial layer. At that point, your body can no longer chemically distinguish between glucose and fructose eaten as HFCS or as sucrose in typical HFCS formulations (i.e. HFCS 50).
HFCS 55 has a 5% excess of fructose, which is comparable to a sucrose-sweetened drink with real fruit juice (orange, berry) added. Outside of the upper digestive system, there is essentially zero chance of chemically detecting the monosaccharide mass difference between an HFCS 55 sweetened drink and a sucrose-sweetened or HFCS 50 sweetened beverage.
There *may* be good reasons to avoid sweet fruit juices; they don't satisfy appetite well and nutritionally they are unremarkable beyond the sugars they contain. People would be far better off trying to eat the equivalent in fresh fruit; they'd feel fuller faster and for longer. (They would still be consuming an excess of fructose to glucose, which tends to raise the question of whether the excess is the problem rather than the absolute dose of both monosaccharides, since heavy fruit eaters are rarely diabetic, although you could argue that raw fruit eaters also end up consuming starches as well, and since those are cleaved into pretty much nothing but glucose, that does depress the fructose: glucose ratio).
However, fructose is pretty benign; people have been eating a lot of it as a monosaccharide for millennia. It's in every fruit, hence the name. It's half of the most common plant disaccharide (sucrose).
HFCS 50, a very common food additive, is benign in the same way sucrose is benign.
HFCS 55, another common food additive, has a 55:45 ratio, comparable to most non-starchy whole raw fruits, and practically all natural fruit juices.
It is the overconsumption of calories of whatever provenance that is harmful. The dose makes the poison. For monosaccharides, the amount at which harm sets in is very high (many grams/kg of body mass, daily over long periods).
The problem with naturally sweetened drinks is that they're high in calories, they do not sate appetite, and they are cheap.
High consumption of *any* naturally sweetened drink will cause all sorts of problems, including weight gain (and diseases that are associated with that) and tooth erosion.