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

Re:What is the Conference Board of Canada?

[Colonel Korn]

As a Canadian, my first reaction to reading this story on /. was "what is the prestigious Conference Board of Canada?" I mean, I know what the "Ontario government" is and the "US copyright lobby" and "Canadian copyright lobby" are self-explanatory terms, but I'm not familiar with the Conference Board of Canada. When I read it here, I thought maybe it was an agency of the federal government.

Anyway, I little digging turns up that the Conference Board of Canada is basically a non-profit think-tank, that is funded on a per-service basis. So private groups and governments will pay it to research a topic and publish a paper on it. It also holds conferences and does research reports on its own. According to their official website, their areas of expertise are "running conferences", "conducting, publishing, and disseminating research", "economic trends", and "public policy issues". It is affiliated, but legally separate from, the U.S./international "The Conference Board, Inc. of New York".

They state: "Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests."

A "think tank" is just a group of non-experts who organize expert-produced information despite their lack of qualifications and understanding of the topics they discuss. They can dig up sources satisfactorily, but they get into serious trouble when they try to draw conclusions. Friends don't let friends believe a word written in a think tank.

Re:You reap what you sow

[R2.0]

"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. "

Right on, Brother!

I used to grade homework assignments for an Intro to Practical Logic course, and about 1-2x/semester I'd find 2 assignments that were obviously the product of "collaboration" - and no, it was not encouraged. Typically, I'd be grading a stack and would come on a paper that was not only badly wrong, but idiosyncratically wrong - trains of logic that would take contorted paths to prove "A=-A". I'd grade it, pull the next one, and lo and behold there's the exact same train of convoluted logic. I'd grade that and then paperclip them together and give them to the professor with a note to the effect that I believe the students were cheating. And the consequences to the students were...nothing.

Not a thing. Wasn't even mentioned to them. The professor basically didn't want to be bothered. Keep in mind that I only passed through the most flagrant examples - there were plenty I suspected (correct answers but word-for-word identical) but didn't pass through. I mean, Lord knows I wasn't a saint, but at least TRY to cover your tracks, please. Think of the graders!