Plagiarism At The Conference Board of Canada

Roadkill 62 Comments

Nice work by Michael Geist; – “The role of the Ontario government obviously raises questions about taxpayer dollars being used to pay for a report that simply recycles the language of a U.S. lobby group paper.”
conference_board_of_canada.jpg
Lots more at the link.
Update – When in a hole… ($15K? Remind me to up my rates for cut ‘n paste work.)

62 Replies to “Plagiarism At The Conference Board of Canada”

  1. So what a minute, a paper about copyright protections plagiarizes another paper? Interesting.

  2. Off in a corner somewhere, irony is hyperventilating it is laughing so hard.

  3. The US DMCA is a feeble attempt that will do nothing but stifle Competition…
    Canada is right to LOOK at the whole package as a PIG with Lip Stick
    The Mulrroney mistake RE: Drug Patents comes to mind

  4. See? It does prove that Canada is slack on copyright and anti-pirating laws. So it is taxpayers’ money well spent.

  6. The CBoC is just another Lieberal infested joke like the C.D. Howe Institute.

  8. The ‘Conservatives’ have screwed copyright reform 2x over with Prentice The Dolt at Industry.
    Clement The Clown is too busy cutting pension bailout cheques to GM to get anything done, it’s still 3 years away.

  10. “I still wonder why scum like ted and hardboiled are even aloud to post.”
    My guess is comic relief. Besides, posting on Kate’s site is at her discretion. It’s her bat & balls so to speak. You play by the rules(pretty reasonable) or don’t play at all.

  11. I know, I know, but they just…….
    I guess I have said a thing or 2 that would have gotten me booted from most other sites.

  13. Actually, Free & Texas Canuck, it’s because the Web is huge experiment, designed by a small, secret, group of scientists (of whom I am one), in order to try to get people to try to, without understanding what they are doing, explain to us why they are so stupid. So far, the experiment is doing very well indeed. I predict that the results of this experiment will help us figure out what we need to do to replace the hopelessly inadequate, though quaint, concept of egalitarian democracy. It’s all well and good to be anti-elitist, until you need a partial differential equation solved. But at that point, you have to consult the elite. Now you may well say, Vitruvius, isn’t telling us this giving away the secret? Nah, you won’t believe me anyway 😉

  14. Ah ha!
    Vitruvius is actually a mouse trying to find out what 42 means. Forget all this Roman Engineer crap, that’s just another feint.

  15. The irony of this notwithstanding, as per the DMCA and other such stuff, being a comp. engineer and musician, I still have no problem pirating from the web. The fact is the technology is readily available, and they can’t sue us all.
    For music: I dislike pumping money into the major labels so they can churn out more crap like Britney Spears and watch as her and similar crap drop the bar for us all, both musically, and morally. If you’re a band I like, come to my city, I’ll buy a shirt. I’d have to buy your album 30 times for you to get the same profit you get from me buying your shirt, not to mention ticket sales proceeds.
    For movies: I don’t really care what Hollywood says, in most cases they have it coming to them. 99% of movies released aren’t worth the 13 dollars admission at a theatre. The remainder, I go and pay, like everyone else. And if anything, for the few of us with the lack of compunction and the know-how to pirate this material, it’s a drop in the bucket. The industry revenues, despite projected “losses due to piracy”, only increase year after year. So please, don’t tell me you feel justified in raking some guy over the coals for thousands of dollars in damages for downloading a few hours worth of stuff that he’d eventually be able to watch on Peachtree (TBS) a year later for what amounts to free, when you’re willing to pay McG to direct a film.
    All of my arguments are necessarily selfish and certainly not of a legal nature. Whatever; you’ll have to come pry my computer from my cold lifeless hands before you can force me to pay 13 dollars, or even 5 dollars on a rental, to watch a Ben Stiller movie. I know I have no ground to stand on, but I know enough to know that these methods aren’t going away, these laws are nearly impossible to enforce, and this political scheming by the RIAA and MPAA to get stricter enforcement is a fools quest. Once they’ve passed this into law, the coders and extremely intelligent people that fuel this scene will just find a newer, smarter way. It’s the nature of the beast.
    Not to mention the companies that own the studios that run these corporate watchdogs are the same companies that sell the technology that encourages and enables pirating, assuming users aren’t only ever watching or listening to the content on their own computer.
    They should do what has been recommended for ages and simply put a fee on hard drives, optical storage, etc, that offets the minor losses of some random guy in his basement downloading your already forgetten b-grade movie/music. They did it with cassette tapes and videotapes, what’s changed?
    /rant

  16. Posted by: FREE at May 25, 2009 1:55 PM
    Hey precious – learn a little, you’ll become a better person.
    Once one moves beyond partisanship, you grow. Though, there are those who aren’t smart enough to get beyond partisanship – and they end up as reactive fossils stating talking points. The end state of permitting oneself to be manipulated. C’est la vie.
    http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2439/125/
    http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3025/125/
    There you go pal. Being informed is a citizen’s responsibility.
    Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind – Thomas Jefferson

  17. Meshuggah:
    “They had it coming to them” is hardly a moral justification for committing a crime. No one is forcing you to pay $13. Your options are…
    (1) Don’t see the movie.
    (2) Wait till it comes out on rental.
    (3) Wait till it’s on TV.

  19. Rabbit: True. Sad but true.
    I recognize that this is likely the wrong forum for promulgation of pro-media-piracy viewpoints, not that that’s my goal here, just this topic makes me very aggitated. I know have the choice, and invariably, by the letter of the law, I choose wrong. However, I’m not hurting anyone, and the MPAA doesn’t lose revenue when I do this: I wouldn’t bother with the movie if I actually had to pay for it.
    Yikes it’s tough talking about this because the conservative values in me tell me I’m wrong. That being said, I know a number of Albertans (read: conservatives) who continue to utilize p2p to get their hands on content illegally who are perfectly normal people, some even more right-wing than I am. I suppose I disagree with the characterization of these acts as criminal, but at the same time I don’t know how else you can classify it.
    Having limited income to dispose of on entertainment, it’s basically a situation of have your cake and eat it to. I won’t justify it, it can’t be justified, as you have appropriately pointed out, and I was expecting any number of people to tell me so. Yet it occurs, and is largely socially acceptable, at least with near everyone I know.
    So, Rabbit, you’re absolutely correct. And yet, I still don’t agree with copyright laws as applied to media and music sharing.
    I would finish by saying I’ll comply when I have to. Until then, free is free.

  20. What about looking at it this way, Meshuggah. And, disclaimer: I have been a professional software developer since 1971. I’ve used Unix since ’76, and have run various duly licensed versions of it and derivatives on my own and on my various companys’ hardware since ’81. I’ve never broken a hardware, software, or content lock. I think deCSS is a burglar’s tool.

    My equity position in the fruit of my brow is principally protected by copyright law, although I did capture a WIPO patent last Thursday, but patents have become a scam for now, so let’s leave that aside. I’ve seen and been through every IP trend since ’71. The key to the problem, in my opinion, is the free volitional contractual market. If some producers are being unreasonable, and we have a free market, then some other bright producer will step up, offer a more reasonable product, and reap his just profit for his product or service well provided, according to the actual market’s definition of well.

    But that will happen only if our system of justice protects our contract law. I have a problem with thieves and marxists stealing private intellectual property traded solely according to contract terms that they agreed to and then want to violate. Consider the following analogy. Let’s say you purchase a legal copy of a physical device that isn’t principally a collection if bit representations, for example, a TV, a pen, a book, &c. Let’s say it’s stolen, or breaks down. Should you now be able to steal another one to replace it because you’ve already paid for the first one? Let’s say you buy one for your living room. Should you be able to steal another one for your bedroom, or your office, because you’ve already paid for one?

    Ok, let’s say that like our new-fangled bit-copiers you had an atom-copier. Should you be able to put the device you bought in your atom-copier and use the result in another room, or give the result to your friend, thus denying compensation to the holder of the intellectual property rights of the device design that you or your friend would have had to duly account for if you had bought your second device in the contractual transaction market? People are confused because this bit-copying technology is new, and they don’t yet appreciate the atom-copying analogue.

    I think that one of the reasons that we don’t yet have a proper functioning micro-payments market for on-line copyright content is that the extent of theft of said content makes such market currently intractable. However, if we succeed in limiting such theft, then I think that a micro-payments infrastructure would flourish.

    Why I can’t I pay, say, a dollar an hour to watch massive libraries of all recorded video, audio, and text, for profit, instead of just the stuff that leaks out to Google & YouTube? Why can’t I watch any Johnny Carson show ever, for a dollar an hour? Why? Because right now, it’s too easy to steal, so there’s no market to fix that. People won’t pay the dollar, they’ll steal the content, because they are immoral, and/or there’s no effective punitive penalty, and/or therefore there’s no alternative tractable mechanism, and/or they’re just stupid.

    The market contract for your purchase or your YouTube video view should determine what you can and can’t do with it. The purchase transaction contract may include specific limitations, such as anti-copying locks. Are you buying the medium or the song? Look at the contract. If you don’t like the contract, don’t buy. Don’t become a safe-cracker. After all, who do you think you are? Why shouldn’t the law apply to you? Try singing instead. You can sing, can’t you?

  21. Vitruvius, (May 25, 2009 2:30 PM)
    People are selectively stupid. By that I mean, if it does effect them directly in one way or another, they ignore it. An example. I once owned a business where I had cash register operators. Most employees could not give change when given a dollar for a 95 cent item without the cash register calculating the change. Yet, if I shortchanged any of these road scholars 5 cents in their pay, they would be in my office complaining. They knew exactly what was owing them, even after deductions! Go figure.

  23. Oh, I wouldn’t mind if they were selectively stupid.
    It’s that they’re stupidly selective that bothers me.
    Do you understand this? The Jackie Mason accent?

  24. Vit: Well said, to which I can only say you’re absolutely correct.
    Now I know why this topic makes me agitated, my mind ends up in this paradoxical state of knowing I’m wrong while refusing to change behaviour. It’s like trying to quit smoking (my other bad habit).

  25. “these road scholars 5 cents in their pay”
    Hey, if you get a minute, could you ask the “road scholars” why the new pavement patches are always so dark?

  27. oH!! And:
    “Try singing instead. You can sing, can’t you?”
    Actually, not that well. I’m always flat 🙂 Karma?
    I had one other comment on your post Vit… you mention mirco-payment systems are ignored and are largely irrelevant thus far, generally due to the ease by which the content can be stolen: ie. there’s no incentives to use such a service when it all could be had for free.
    Overall, your point is correct, with the exception of iTunes. I would claim, without any particular cited resources except nearly 10 years of p2p use, that music is pirated more than anything else, yet iTunes is incredibly profitable and successful, and utilizes the micro-payment system you want, and which admittedly, even I would use (I don’t use iTunes though, they don’t really carry my taste musically). How has iTunes been so successful with the massive amounts of music sharing techology that existed well before for the low low price of free?
    Why haven’t the major movie studios stepped up to offer their contect similarly? Arguably because they also own most of the Theaters where they can additionally rape us for ungodly ticket and food prices. I digress, and apologize for what reads as a leftist comment, I know I can choose not to go to the movies. In fact, that’s the entire point, I don’t go to the movies (often), it’s not worth it. But if I could get a movie streamed to me online in a pay service that was released at the same time as the movie (ie. a reasonable service, served well) then I would totally use it.
    Anyhow… I’m rambling now.

  28. I haven’t been to a movie theater since 1979, Meshuggah. I haven’t watched television for four years, and I cancelled three of my four newspaper subscriptions three years ago. Yet, on average, I spend an hour or two a day watching archival video on YouTube (SDA Late Nite Radio may be more work that you think 😉
    Thus it is the case that I and I would hope we would very much like to have a functioning free-market system via which I and we could legitimately support the content that I and we wish to view. Most people stealing it probably isn’t the best way to go. On the other hand, of course, if you’re interested in reading books older than 70 years since the author died, or whatever it is, there’s lot’s of them. Here, try U. S. Grant’s: Personal Memoirs.

  29. What’s changed from the days we used to record cassette tapes with songs from the radio? Never bought an album or pre-recorded cassette. Such a simpler time….

  30. I guess there are two different paths this blog item is heading and both seem to carry merit as a discussion on it’s own. The fact that the Conference Board of Canada is plagerizing it’s reports is sad by itself. The topic being copyrights and pirating is even more ironic. The second item of copyrights, pirating, fair use et al in the digital era is a complicated issue on it’s own.
    Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t there a “tax” imposed about 6 or 7 years back on blank recording media such as tape and blank CDs? Wasn’t this money to be used to help these poor starving Canuck musicians? A fat lot of good that did. And exactly where are these billions of pirated $$$ coming from? Are they counting the MP3 I downloaded to listen to once a year and assuming I’d be going out and buying the CD for $20 or whatever they go for these days? Wait a few weeks and then you can find it in Walmart’s bargin bin for $5.
    Software piracy has always facinated me only because I can’t in good faith feel sorry for the likes of Microsoft or Adobe whose product prices are in the range of obscene. Even more obscene is that there is usually a very comperable product out there for free or little charge (think Open Office). Is it because the market has made them a virtual monopoly or is it they are creating the market?
    For the record, all the software on my pcs are wither licensed, freeware or shareware.

  31. What’s changed, Anne, is there is no longer copy degredation. When you only had an analogue copier, like a casette tape, the copy was never as good as the original, indeed, incremental copies degraded incrementally. Yet with a bit copier, and a digital master, each incremental copy is as good as the master. This leaves no archival margin for the artist’s original master work.

  32. *
    it’s what the socialists do. remember when mcslippery said they were
    gonna stop throwing money away on consultants?
    just another lie…
    “Overall agency spending has ballooned to $839 million while
    the delivery date for province-wide, electronic patient health
    records has been pushed back to 2015.”
    *

  33. $30 billion worth of counterfeiting in Canada every year? That would mean $100 of IP theft for every man, woman & child drawing a breath in the country! 1.3 billion downloads? That’s another doozy, again that just over 43 downloads per person!
    That also means someone is valuing their songs @ $2.33 each!
    Wow.

  34. Vit: Does Grant’s Personal Memories come in audiobook on a torrent site? It’s the only way I “read” now.
    /sarc

  36. We’re going to have to disagree on parts of this one Vitruvius. I too believe in the sanctity of contracts which is why I am unable to use large amounts of modern software since I will not agree to the licence terms. I’ve never setup a copy of windows alone and used to get my receptionist to deal with the EULA agree/disagree step or told the store I was buying the computer from to either set it up for me completely or take windoze off the machine. Most of my machines can’t display youtube video content because installation of an updated copy of flash player requires agreeing not to disassemble their program; I view it as my right to disassemble any code I have access to and in my earlier computing days spent most of my time in a debugger.
    Yesterday I was going through some old boxes and found a 25 year old 8″ floppy disk drive that I never got around to hooking up to my Commodore 64. What impressed me was that the manual that came with the drive came with complete schematics of the drive circuitry, a complete description of the interface signals and disk recording format. It has been many years since any piece of electronic equipment came with this amount of detail about its workings. New chips have anti-hacking capabilities built in so that one can’t acquire the code which makes much equipment totally useless if the manufacturer goes out of business.
    I need to know exactly how things work and the first thing I usually do with any piece of electronic equipment is to disassemble it to see how it works and to get a feel for the design. I do the same things with software although time pressures have prevented me from exploring software in as much detail as I would like. 20 years ago programs were smaller and, as another example of transparency DEC used to provide source code for the RT11 operating system which one would then compile into a customized version for the hardware one was running on. It was presumably illegal to copy the software but the DEC sales people used to facilitate sales by mentioning that if one wanted to save some money on the software, xxx had a system from which it could be easily copied to the new system that you were going to purchase. Not only did DEC provide full source code, they also had excellent documentation of all of the internals of RT11 which made writing device drivers so simple. Back in those days I used to split my time between designing and wiring up custom hardware and writing code. Being in an academic environment, any code that I wrote I’d give away to anyone who wanted it as was also the case with the logic diagrams of the data acquisition circuitry I built.
    Since the DMCA has come in I’ve noticed a trend to greater secrecy and I worry about loss of data with company failures. I absolutely refuse to get music or any other information in a medium where the data is locked via an algorithm that I don’t have knowledge of. I use deCSS to copy DVD’s to disk so I can trim off the garbage at the start of DVD’s that I have no intention of watching and get infuriated when I can’t skip it. I also like the far greater control that open source DVD players give over how one can watch a movie compared to commercial players. I don’t buy much new music and am slowly converting my LP’s and cassette tapes to digital format but keep the old medium for backup. Most of the music I downloaded was music which I already owned and it was just in a more convenient format. I would pay a small amount to download old music as obscure 60’s rock is missing from Gnutella or Limewire. I would not pay to download this music in a locked format.
    In 1994 there was an excellent book entitled “Inside Windows” which dissected the windows OS in minute detail and was instrumental in my writing a number of program which would have otherwise been impossible. The equivalent detail for newer versions of windoze is not available most likely as a result of the DMCA. This is one piece of legislation that has no place in Canada.
    With regard to atom copiers, I’m eagerly awaiting their arrival. If they were freely available without restrictions on what they could copy then society would change drastically, and for the better IMHO. There would be even more of a demand for people who could design and build things as copying cannot produce novelty. How people would be paid for the fruits of their intellect would change, but there would still be a premium for novelty.

  38. Has this been posted?
    Permission granted to read same.
    …-
    “Canada file-swapping capital of the world
    In a blog posting today, Michael Geist charged the Conference Board with publishing a deceptive, plagiarized report. The Conference Board of Canada stands behind its report, Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Economy.
    * Read the Conference Board’s statement in response to Michael Geist
    * Read the report
    * Register for the conference on IPR”
    http://www.conferenceboard.ca/

  40. I can’t believe someone read this report! Aren’t these tomes supposed to be deep-sixed and gather dust on a shelf in a basement? You have got to love the internet – really hard to justify this sloppy, lazy research. Good work. Cheers.

  41. “Try singing instead. You can sing, can’t you?”
    Actually, not that well. I’m always flat 🙂 Karma?
    Me too!

  42. So being flat prevents you from singing, I mean, just for joy? Can’t we share singing, just for joy? I mean, people used to do that a lot, in the past, and now we don’t so much. I know, I know, I’m such a conservative.

  43. Rotten music, rotten movies … I really don’t see why anyone bothers to even pirate most of it.
    They should be grateful that at least someone is listening or watching their sub standard offerings.
    Nearly all of it is geared to 14 year old mind and that demographic has little cash, so it stands to reason that they will try to steal it. Most of them have computers.

  44. Good point, Momar. Why, I paid 150 bucks for my 17 DVD set
    of all 51 episodes of Dianna Rigg as Emma Peel in the Avengers.

  45. WOW. A state produced publication commits extensive infringement. You couldn’t think this shit up.

  46. WOW. A state produced publication ON infringement commits extensive infringement. You couldn’t think this shit up.

  47. I dunno, I still find it bizarre that federal politicians who twist and shout and make an ass of themselves in general over INTANGIBLE ‘intellectual property rights’, while at exactly the same time these same brite lites completely ignore REAL TANGIBLE, ‘feel with your hands and walk on’ property rights.
    Like say, the ownership of the grain that western farmers grow on their own farms, with their own money.
    I guess the Quebecization (Whats yours is mine and whats mine is mine) of PMSH is complete.
    Who would have thought?

  48. I can’t get too excited about this. In the “churn-out-reports” world everybody cadges from everyone else. Academics even do it — taking credit for things written by graduate students. That I think is offensive, as someone is definitely disadvantaged in the power relationship. Journalism too — they all feed off of each other — just changing the words a bit more than this fellow did. Very little original stuff. This type of thing is small potatoes. Where else is the person supposed to get ideas from except from other reports, some of which contain important ideas that need to be spread. I would be more concerned about the legitimacy of the observation.

  49. So let me get the straight, Rocky: you want Mr. Harper to be a dictator, beholden to you, so he can just do whatever you want, pace his own party, and a minority government. Is that what you want him to attempt to do?

  50. “So being flat prevents you from singing, I mean, just for joy?”
    In the case of *Rachel Corrie*, yes, I’m afraid so.
    /:>8>

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