How does a lobby group manufacture consensus? As University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist points out, it does so very, very carefully.

Geist has unraveled a tangled skein of reports, polls, and lobbying on copyright issues in Canada, tracing a wide variety of this material back to two primary sources: the music and movie businesses. Pay enough groups to produce similar conclusions and—presto!—a "consensus forms" as later papers quote earlier papers, even though everything is funded from the same sources and often uses the same data.

As Geist puts it, "the net effect [of paying for multiple reports from multiple groups] has been a steady stream of reports that all say basically the same thing, cite the same sources, make the same recommendations, and often rely on each other to substantiate the manufactured consensus on copyright reform."

It goes almost without saying that such consensus is then helpfully provided by lobbyists to lawmakers.

Funding research

In his examples, Geist considers four major reports on Canadian copyright from the last couple of years. All four separately recommended the creation of an "IP council." What did they suggest calling this council? An "Intellectual Property Coordination Council," and "IP Ministerial Coordination Council," an "Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Council," and an "IP Inter-ministerial Coordination Council."

All four reports suggested the creation of an IP "task force," too, with nearly identical names and descriptions. And the list goes on.

But the multiplicity of reports doesn't necessarily indicate a real multiplicity of research and viewpoints. As Geist points out, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) and the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association (CMPDA) directly paid for three of these reports, while the fourth was paid for by two of the groups CRIA and CMPDA had already funded.

Chart courtesy Michael Geist

It's a little hard to believe that research groups would sell themselves out to funders in any sort of overt way, so who knows how or if influence was applied in each case? But we do know that it happened in at least one case, when The Conference Board of Canada (ironically) plagiarized parts of its own IP report.

The Conference Board finally 'fessed up after Geist unmasked the problems.

"The Conference Board of Canada regrets the fact that this project (specifically, three intellectual property rights research reports) has suffered lapses of process and judgment," said the group. "Plagiarism did occur, and it wasn’t detected due to insufficient oversight of this project."

The problems went deeper than plagiarism, though. "The evidence indicates there was undue reliance on feedback from a funder who was deemed to have important technical expertise," said the Board. "We failed to seek similar feedback from a broad range of stakeholders. The report relied heavily on too few sources and lacked sufficient balance."

Taken together, the various reports were used, in Geist's words, to "advance the same goals, claims, arguments, and recommendations," but to do so in a way that made it appear many groups had come to exactly the same conclusions. Such conclusions are then fed to legislators as evidence that they must act, and always in one direction: more copyright protections and stricter penalties.

Such strategies, of course, aren't limited to Canada, nor to particular industries, but Canadian rightsholders seem particularly good at deploying them. And Michael Geist seems pretty good at exposing them.