Report on piracy using plagiarized text and distorted numbers

[S P Arif Sahari Wibowo]

------ http://www.arifsaha.com/ forwarded messages ------

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/canada-ip-battlelines-plagiarized-report-piracy-guesses.ars
> Canada IP battlelines: "plagiarized" report, piracy "guesses"
> 
> What sort of research group "plagiarizes" a report advocating 
> for stronger intellectual property laws? And why does the 
> Business Software Alliance give specific percentages for 
> software piracy even in countries where it has done no 
> surveys?
...
> Last updated May 29, 2009 11:13 AM CT
...
> First up was a report from the Conference Board of Canada, a 
> nonpartisan research group that was asked to produce a report 
> on the digital economy. When the report in question came out, 
> the press release trumpeted, "Canada seen as the file-swapping 
> capital of the world."
...
> Geist revealed that numerous sections of the Conference Board 
> report were lifted nearly verbatim from an earlier report by 
> the International Intellectual Property Alliance. Credit was 
> sometimes given to the IIPA, though a mere citation doesn't 
> give someone the right to use another's exact words without 
> quote marks.
...
> many of the other numbers used in the report are of dubious 
> provenance or are just sloppy. For instance, Geist notes that 
> "the OECD study that the Conference Board says found the 
> highest per capita incidence of unauthorized file sharing in 
> the world [in Canada] did not reach that conclusion.
...
> The Conference Board said that it "stands behind the findings 
> of its report."
...
> But the Conference Board has now announced on the front page 
> of its website that it has recalled the reports in question
...
> Geist has now made another charge: the BSA is literally 
> "guessing" about the piracy rate in countries like Canada.
...
> such numbers are routinely cited as fact by others, showing up 
> for decades in some cases as talking points in favor of 
> tougher copyright laws. Our own past attempts at getting to 
> the bottom of some of the figures commonly used by copyright 
> maximalists shows that some are flat-out ludicrous; others, 
> like the BSA numbers, are estimates based on models, and need 
> to be treated as such by policymakers.
> 
> This is Geist's worry. "Rather than using broad bands to 
> account for errors (i.e. 30-40 percent range), they use very 
> specific figures and then cite even small increases or 
> decreases," he tells Ars. "They do not provide a margin of 
> error. If this is just a model without great precision, the 
> BSA should not be using it to lobby policy makers on the basis 
> that it provides a fairly precise figure."
...

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4000/125/
> The Conference Board of Canada's Deceptive, Plagiarized 
> Digital Economy Report
> Monday May 25, 2009
...

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4005/125/
> BSA Admits Canadian Software Piracy Rates Estimated; Canada 
> Viewed as Low Piracy Country
> Wednesday May 27, 2009
...

http://news.google.ca/news/more?ncl=d2fqMWrlIKhrGcM5jjApktnaggHcM

---------------- end forwarded messages -----------------

-- 
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists