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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."
Turnitin.com eh?
Laws against common assault are no longer being enforced by the police in my Canadian city. If you can't afford to pay the courts to charge them out of your own pocket, nothing will happen to your assailant. So, basically, the police are there to enforce your economic slavery. They are not there to protect you. Incidentally, they just hired 50 more of them here.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The Canadians are always so stuck up about their way of life, but they're liars just like the American.
It's a sincere form a flattery.
Why, plagiarism is highly illegal Cory and Trevor! You shouldn't plagiarize, Cory and Trevor!
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?
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."
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Dear Mrs Morissette,
Please pay attention. This is ironic.
Thank you.
... 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.
Now I can defend against all those cheating accusations in college!
My Comic : www.ourbadidea.com
Blame the artist for all mistakes!
Fernando Poo!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrBZeWjGjl8
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I for one bow down to our new plagiarizing copyright lobby overlords. And on a brighter note this summer looks set to be a scorcher!
Crisis? What crisis? And they're hiring too!
Props Canada, you show those stupid american companies what being a pirate is all about!!
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.
Americans would scram if there was Canadian influence in the affairs of external corporations?
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."
Oh dang it!! I'm Canadian and I just did it again...
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
The summary is incorrect in that at this time, the Ontario Government has yet to seek answers into how the funds it provided were used. The questions posed are by Michael Geist as to what the Minister responsible should be asking.
It's simply Fair Use between assholes.
"...some of the binary files on my hard drive closely approximate the sound of a copyrighted song."
Hey, after all, MP3 is lossy ...
Interview with Richard Syrett, a Canadian talk show radio host.
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
what if Canada gets sued for copyright infringement.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Like I always say (having borrowed the phrase from my former boss), "Why Improvise when you can plagiarize?"
I am surprised this is even newsworthy. If the Canadians want to borrow phrases from other countries' current laws, then that should be simply a compliment to the originating country.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
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.
Michael Geist writes: Update (5:15): Brian Jackson of IT Business reports that the Minister's office acknowledges spending $15,000 on the report. It plans to follow up on the issues raised in my post.
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
Poutine.
"We just realized we could produce more content by borrowing from and building on the work of others. Ow! C'mon, guys!"
...while the Ontario government admits spending thousands of dollars...
That's some serious cash... I mean, almost twelve US dollars!
...copyright laws plagiarize YOU!
I'd wager the money and time allocated to the project were spent playing Team Fortress.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You wont get a unbiased report from anyone including the Conference Board of Canada. Regardless of saying they are not biased. They knew exactly what they were doing was wrong. They just didn't think they would get caught. In the end... The truth always prevails.
Chalk one up for the copyright lobby groups. Even if their supporter was not telling the truth in the report. No one cares, just so long as the argument looks good.
Doesn't Canada (that grey, nameless expanse of of land north of the USA depicted on US school room wall maps) have a liberal attitude to file sharing thereby open to plagiarism?
Additional information has come to light since the original posting. Some interesting blog posts from:
Unlike glucose, fructose is almost entirely metabolized in the liver. "When fructose reaches the liver," says Dr. William J. Whelan, a biochemist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, "the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose." Eating fructose as compared to glucose results in lower circulating insulin (pancreatic beta cell insulin release is controlled only by blood glucose levels) and leptin levels, and attenuation in the suppression of ghrelin postprandially.[53] These hormones are implicated in the control of appetite and satiety, and it is suspected that eating large amounts of fructose increases the likelihood of weight gain.[54] Excessive fructose consumption is also believed to contribute to the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.[55]
Also, consider this Newscientist article, this one, and if you want more, have a look at an article published in "The Journal of Clinical Investigation" about a link between HFCS and Diabetes in April.
This is canada's version of the watergate, but no one cares because it's canada.
What did you expect? After all, they're Canadians!
You know, the ones that copy DVDs and music with no penalties and say they're paying for it with a "tax" and then they bring their video cameras into the theaters all the time.
I read it in a report by the Conference Board of Canada!
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
A quote from the report in TFA refers to "ilicit downloads" in the billions, at 65 times the "legal download" rate.
As I recall, Canada charges a tax on recording media to pay the content producers for copies of copyright works made on them. Seems to me that, if the downloades burn the downloaded content onto such taxed media (or have purchased enough taxed media to hold it - and left it empty or used it for other purposes) they've already paid for the content and the download should be licit.
Note that this is NOT legal advice. (And I suspect the MAFIAA have gotten the Canadian legal system set up so they can double-dip already, so attempting this will still get you hosed.) But it seems like an interesting question to bring up whenever they cry about the amount of "illicit" downloading and ask for still MORE dips into your pocketbook.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Heh, yeah. Good luck with that.
"Oh, I was gonna participate in the riot, ya know, but, um, there's this awesome new reality TV show on now, and I've watched, like, the first three episodes, and I needed to find out if Jerry and Mel were going to beat Sasha and Paula to Vatican City, or if maybe Dean would get there first, and anyway my cousin Rebecca wanted me to record it for her, and she said it was probably gonna rain anyway, so..."
if there IS a heightened rate of unauthorized downloading in canada, it's worth noting that shows and clips which are offered for free to US residents via streaming sites like nbc/disneys HULU.com and tv networks own webpages like mtv.com block canadian access to all content. that doesn't leave many alternatives for me if i want to watch a particular SNL clip etc... (the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is a tactic to push canadians to download in the hopes that the actual figures will approach their exaggerated figures). besides, is it really stealing when you are already giving it away?
As with anything, there are good and bad think tanks just like there are good and bad research groups. There are good think tanks which might occasionally have bad employees that take shortcuts. The reputable ones at least get their key facts and figures correct and properly attributed. The best thing to do is to read every report whether it comes from a think tank, an academic institution, or the government with a critical eye. This is what peer review is.
WTF are they going to say when I kill that POS that keeps beating me up and getting away with it. I told them to protect me, they refused, I defended myself. The greatest need guns comes because the police aren't there to protect you, and can't, and it's been ruled that they don't have to. BUY A GUN FOR SELF DEFENSE.
When an officer of the law breaks the law they are no longer acting as an officer of the law and need to be dealt with a
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.
Most powerful lobby groups out to disenfranchise the majority of a nation's populace will fund/establish "Think Tanks" which will report themselves as "independent" or "Unaffiliated", but which have the express purpose of legitimizing their agenda by releasing pseudo-statistical and pseudo-scientific reports.
"think tanks" essentially are designed to find creative ways to backfill propaganda.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Brought back an apparently consciously repressed recent memory of an article alleging Georgia's mental health commission committed the very same [faux pas] last year..
Giving them the bennie of a doubt, guess one could a-ssume they were just early adopters carrying the concept of retweet to the next level...
I comment, therefore I am (procrastinating elsewhere)..
Americans would scream (yes, the 'e' is there) if Canadian corporate interests interfered with US internal matters.
You mean the way we all screamed and rioted and burned the Canadian embassies when MCA/Universal, an arm of Quebec based Seagram, played a major role in lobbying for the DMCA in 1998? Please. Nobody here cares that much.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
"that would have Americans screaming if the reverse was true."
- I doubt that. As an American I think we're just as gullible to this BS as anyone else, and we're rapidly becoming sheep who accept anything that is dumped on us.