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."

Comments

Irony is alive and well

[Drakkenmensch]

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?

Re:Irony is alive and well

[Anonymous Coward]

Lobbying used to be called bribery. It's time the people took control back of their own countries.

Time for world-wide civil disobedience.

Their response is just as bad and very revealing

[ashitaka]

"...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.

Duh

[jpmorgan]

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.

Sad but True

[hardwarejunkie9]

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.

You reap what you sow

[QuoteMstr]

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.

Re:You reap what you sow

[Minwee]

Copying that freshman assignment leads to copying conference reports later on in life.

Actually, copying that freshman assignment _really_ pisses off the poor schmuck who has to grade it. Not only have you just insulted his (or her) intelligence by turning in something that was obviously cribbed from Wikipedia, but also instead of just spending a few minutes reading your paper, scribbling down a grade and then moving on to the next one he has to look up the original source that you copied from, have a chat with the professor in charge of the class, take time out of his day to have a meeting with you and explain exactly how dumb you just were, and then after wasting all that time dealing with your mess, decide whether or not to inform your department head and have you expelled for it.

By that time the only two things keeping you in school at all are the fact that there's an awful lot of paperwork involved in having you expelled, and that your professor may still feel sorry for you. Your best bet is to admit everything, tell a mildly sad story about how you were running out of time and panicked, and then never do it again.

Saying "No, you're wrong, I just forgot one citation but everything else is fine" is not it.

Re:And the problem is??

[davecb]

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

Re:Funny

[Captain Spam]

Hockey is our national sport.

Actually, it's Lacrosse.

Frankly, the point still stands. Perhaps even better.