Sorta like setting an oil derrick on fire to protest global warming

Boing-Boing tells us of a lil Canadian think-tank report. The Conference Board of Canada (sounds so official, I trust them already) who’re self-characterized as “the foremost, independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada. Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests” (you know they’re independent, they said so.) had been paid by the province of Ontario to do a study on the “Digital Economy.” So they applied their foremost independent research to produce an objectively non-profitable report.

Now they might be non-partisan, or lobby for specific interests, but it seems that the report they plagiarized came from an agency that is and does.

From Michael Geist:

[The Conference Board’s] claims should take a major hit based on last week’s release of a deceptive, plagiarized report on the digital economy that copied text from the International Intellectual Property Alliance (the primary movie, music, and software lobby in the U.S.), at times without full attribution. The report itself was funded by copyright lobby groups (U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, Copyright Collective of Canada which represents U.S. film production) along with 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.

I’ve piled on plagiarists here before, but you’ve sunk to a new low if you’re plagiarizing language specifically to be alarmist about the piracy of intellectual property. So asshats all round.