OTTAWA and TORONTO – The Conference Board of Canada has recalled three reports that it issued late last week, claiming an internal review determined that it “did not follow (its) high quality research standards”.
The recall came after columnist and University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist flagged the reports as plagiarized from studies done by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) in the U.S., without full attribution.
In his blog on Monday, Geist also said that the report was funded by copyright lobby groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, and the Copyright Collective of Canada (which represents U.S. film production), in addition to the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation.
“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,” his post reads, before comparing the two reports side by side. Even where the Conference Board attributed the data, Geist noted “that the report simply adopts the IIPA positions and language as its own.”
Cartt.ca wrote a story on the reports after receiving the Conference Board’s press release, but pulled it after learning of the plagiarism accusations.
The Boards reports, called ‘Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Economy’; ‘National Innovation Performance and Intellectual Property Rights: A Comparative Analysis’; and Intellectual Property Rights – Creating Value and Stimulating Investment’, were scheduled to be presented at its intellectual property rights-themed conference held tomorrow (May 29) in Toronto.
In a response on its website, the Conference Board denied Geist’s plagiarism charge, and defended itself by calling the American lobby paper “a source document”, though did acknowledge “that some of the cited paragraphs (in its reports) closely approximate the wording of a source document”. It also said that only one citation was missed, which it has since corrected.
One of the reports blamed Canada’s weak intellectual property rights for giving the country “an unwelcome reputation as the file-swapping capital of the world”. It also said that “lax regulation and enforcement” were the cause of Canada’s high rate of Internet piracy, and estimated the number of “illicit” downloads as 1.3 billion, or 65 times higher than the number of legal downloads, which it pegged at 20 million.
But Geist, who is also an expert on technology law and intellectual property law issues, noted that many of the report’s statistics are deceptively out-of-date, some by as much as six years, while other data is “simply false”.
“In other words,” Geist wrote, “the Conference Board relies on a survey of 1,200 people conducted more than three years ago to extrapolate to a claim of 1.3 billion unauthorized downloads.” He said that the data was lifted from a press release issued by the Canadian Recording Industry Association in January of 2008, which itself relied on data from a survey conducted in 2006 by research group Pollara. The Board’s statement did not respond specifically to this allegation.
The Conference Board of Canada’s website describes its mission as building “leadership capacity for a better Canada by creating and sharing insights on economic trends, public policy and organizational performance”. It bills itself as the "the foremost, independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada”, and as “objective and non-partisan”. “We do not lobby for specific interests," reads another of its bullet points.
It seems as though it has some work ahead to restore its reputation.
