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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?
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.
"...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.
Lobbying used to be called bribery. It's time the people took control back of their own countries.
Time for world-wide civil disobedience.
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.
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.
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 usually at this point that I like to remind Americans that Canada is the only country to succesfully attack the White House, and there are still scorch marks on the walls of that hallowed building to commemorate it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington
So keep it up skippy. We're a feisty lot. Don't fall for that "Canada is a peace loving country" crap either. Hockey is our national sport.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
Hockey is our national sport.
Actually, it's Lacrosse.
True, but they felt so bad about it afterwords that they apologized a lot and finally burned down their own Parliament buildings about a hundred years later.
That's one of your national sports, and only for the past fifteen years. Before 1994 Canada's only national sport was Lacrosse, a game loosely based on an old First Nations game in which hundreds of participants would run around a field beating each other with long sticks while ignoring a small ball. Modern Ice Hockey is just a pale, polite shadow of Lacrosse.