Slashdot Mirror
Conference Board Admits Plagiarism, Pulls Copyright Report
An anonymous reader writes "The Conference Board of Canada has withdrawn
all three reports on intellectual property after allegations this week by Michael Geist of plagiarism. The organization now admits that its report on copyright was plagiarized from US copyright lobby groups."
Had these reports been subject to "Internal Review", they never would have been released. What they really meant to say was: "We look like money grabbing hypocritical lobby group puppets and need to do some damage control before our reputation is permanently scarred." Yeah... thats what they *really* meant to say. I work at a company where all externally released documents are subject to internal review. That means that before the document can be released, at least 2 other people are required to review the document and sign off on it before it is released. The author and reviewers names are on the cover, and their signatures are captured and stored in a tracking system to show that they approved the documents. *Thats* an internal review process. To say that the Conf. Board of Canada did an internal review? Thats utterly laughable.
Good work Mr. Geist for spotting this and stepping on it very early.
First I've heard of it. I've never had troubles accessing any site ever. This article seems a little bias when you consider how much more liberal Canadian laws are in the use of our internet and information technology in general. (i.e. we don't have a DMCA)
And pure irony on the part of the article!
I, for one, will mention this incident whenever the topic moves to copyright infringement. They lost the moral high ground too, now.
What's a "conferance" board? Spell-check, anyone..?
Bite my shiny metal ass!
Is that the Canadian's downloaded the plagiarized reports via BitTorrent.
I, for one, am speechless....maybe they should have been too.....
Seriously Conference Board of Canada, seriously? Did they think that people wouldn't check up on this??
The GPL uses copyright only insofar as it subverts the copyright system against itself.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
There's a difference between hating what some people do with a concept and the actual concept itself.
The one on copyright and intellectual property is as divided a perspective as abortion.
At issue is the different groups interpretation of what they should be allowed to do with a commodity.
One sells it and thinks that they should be allowed to control how their product is used once sold.
The other thinks that it has purchased a product and since they now own it, they should be able to do anything with it that they want.
The first group puts in place digital rights management controls to stop the "illegal" copying of their product.
The second group gets mad since they aren't able to use the product as they want now and think it's ok to break the "protection" in order to get at the goods they paid for.
This leads to an easy market for file sharing to flourish. The first group having left a gaping hole in the market for high quality digital downloads at low prices from the savings on physical packaging, shipping, and floorspace in stores. Only now with itunes and the other online outlets catching up to the ease and variety of the online file sharing services, they missed the boat on delivering to the masses what they wanted and could have given but didn't.
So when an organization comes along promoting the ideas that people should respect the copyright and intellectual property of others and then finds themselves on the wrong end of that spectrum. Yes, we get to laugh at them. Just as we should laugh at the file sharing people they claim that they are not taking something that doesn't belong to them unless they have purchased the song legitimately. Fair is fair.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Ok... the title above is obviously lifted, but it comes very handy and no longer under copyright protection, hopefully.
Let's see then the story here:
1) US copyright groups want to send people to jail in the US and around the world for downloading music, etc. for their own listening, viewing, etc. pleasure.
2) Conference Board of Canada was downloading documents from US copyright lobby groups, lifted them partially into a paid, for profit report to support the Canadian government to formulate laws, reflecting the interests of US copyright lobby groups.
3) How about feeding the US lobby groups recommended medicine to Conference Board of Canada as a test? Suing the hell out of the Conference Board of Canada? Demanding jail term for the head of the organization?
4) How about commissioning a report, on how US copyright lobby groups are influencing or directly rig the legislation process in other countries?
Well, no, they couldn't. Plagiarism is taking someone else's original work, either in whole or in part, and purporting that it is your own original work. A small example of this is using an attributed quote in a paper and not identifying it as a quote.
A large example is copying your entire paper from someone else, putting your name on it, and submitting it as yours.
Note that plagiarism with permission is still plagiarism. If your friend gives you his term paper from last year and you turn it in as yours, that's still plagiarism. If you do it without permission, it may also be a copyright violation.
Under their retraction they provide a contact link. I clicked on that link and gave them my thoughts as pasted below, and the acknowledgement promises a response. Will get back to you on upon their reply.
Dear Sir/Madam,
After almost selling out Canada to the USA via your plagiarized reports on intellectual property, I would strongly suggest that you contract Prof. Michael Geist or at least work closely with him in the next effort. Michael is well know, extremely knowledgeable on the subject, and trusted by a large number of Canadians. Only in this way will you regain the prestige you once had.
Sincerely,
...
Oh, but there's a flip side to not having copyright: Nothing stops anyone from taking what you've done, obfuscating it, encrypting it, tying it to a platform, and releasing it as if it were their own.
Oh, and they'll throw chairs at you if you try pointing out that they're doing it.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Oh, but there's a flip side to not having copyright: Nothing stops anyone from taking what you've done, obfuscating it, encrypting it,
One can already do that with GPL code now and make it hard for anyone to spot.
tying it to a platform,
What does copyright have to do with whether something is cross-platform or not?
and releasing it as if it were their own.
A number of people have done that anyway regardless of the existence of copyright or not. I expect many of them probably haven't and won't be noticed for doing so.
It's not the first time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Copyright
It's not the first time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Copyright
I love the double standard: when we do it, we're filthy thieving pirates, if they do it, it's "just an oversight".
Not true at all. The GPL depends on copyright law to put severe restrictions on what you can do with GPL'd code. That is very different than what the situation would be if there was no copyright, i.e. "subverting" the copyright system.
Your description might be applicable to licenses like the BSD license, if you squint hard, and almost but not quite, the LGPL, but definitely not the GPL.