The Blog of Harald

After almost a week of pressure, “The Conference Board of Canada”:http://www.conferenceboard.ca/ finally recalled three reports supporting the lie that Canada is a haven for intellectual property thieves. I love the language:

bq. An internal review has determined that these reports did not follow the high quality research standards of The Conference Board of Canada.

This after “Michael Geist”:http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php accused them of plagiarising the text of one report, without attribution, from the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a major US lobby group representing Hollywood et al.

The details are on on Michael Geist’s weblog, starting with “The Conference Board of Canada’s Deceptive, Plagiarized Digital Economy Report”:http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4000/125/ . I’m particularly dismayed that they initially stood by the report, that it took three days of intense media coverage for them to back down. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that once the attention dies down, these reports will quietly resurface, they’ll circulate internally on Parliament Hill, and our lawmakers will pass draconian copyright legislation based on a lie.

In fact, Canada is a relatively low producer and consumer of stolen intellectual property. I’ll try to dig up the various references that support this (my browser history is acting up :-). For some reason factions within the US government have decided that they can win more votes, or collect more lobbyist dollars, by attacking their neighbour to the North.

I find this especially interested after a recent article from Eric S. Raymond: “Some Iron Laws of Political Economics”:http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=984

bq. Mancur Olson, in his book The Logic Of Collective Action, highlighted the central problem of politics in a democracy. The benefits of political market-rigging can be concentrated to benefit particular special interest groups, while the costs (in higher taxes, slower economic growth, and many other second-order effects) are diffused through the entire population.

bq. The result is a scramble in which individual interest groups perpetually seek to corner more and more rent from the system, while the incremental costs of this behavior rise slowly enough that it is difficult to sustain broad political opposition to the overall system of political privilege and rent-seeking.

Worth a read.