Conference Board of Canada Copyright Material Controversy

Prof. Michael Geist has raised in a posting this morning some allegations concerning, inter alia, plagiarism with respect to a report concerning Canadian IP law entitled “Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Economy” published by the prestigious Conference Board of Canada. I take no position on the substance of these allegations, other than to note the obvious fact that they will be of interest to those concerned with IP and trade policy in Canada and elsewhere. This has been picked up by others, including the very widely read BoingBoing. This issue may well find its way into the main stream media.

The Conference Board, for its part, has published a lengthy defence of its report in a reply to Prof. Geist here entitled "Conference Board defends IPR report". The opening words of the Conference Board response are "In a blog posting today, Michael Geist charged the Conference Board with publishing a deceptive, plagiarized report."

Michael has followed up with a reply to the Conference Board's reponse.

Those who wish to pay $1,595 to attend a Conference Board of Canada conference this Friday, May 29, 2009 at which the report in question will be presented can find out more information about the Conference here.

HK

PS - This has hit the main stream media. See Sarah Schmidt's Canwest story here, which leads off as follows:

OTTAWA — The fight between consumers and the entertainment industry over reforms to Canada's copyright law escalated Monday when one of the country's leading experts on the issue accused the Conference Board of Canada of plagiarizing from a U.S. lobby group's documents to wrongly paint Canadians as the file-swapping capital of the world.