Michael Geist gave confirmation today that he did indeed contact Curtis Cook to verify his statement. This assumes, of course, that he would delete a comment on his blog that was claiming to be him if it wasn’t him, which is a fairly reasonable assumption. With his reputation for being rather meticulous when it comes to looking at new copyright legislation, it would be surprising if he did not verify a source as important as Cook. I’m still left a bit disappointed that more people weren’t asking for clarification on this. Yes you could interpret his original post in a way that suggested that he had verified Cook’s identity, but the interaction between Geist and Cook was still hazy, relegated to three words in the blog post: “with his permission”, which still could have meant that it was simply the permission of whoever it was who posted the comment, not necessarily Cook. Now, however, that aspect of the story is clear. More traditional news sources are also starting to pick this up. I don’t believe we should necessarily give traditional news sources any more authority than blogs these days (both are apt to make major mistakes from time to time), but with a greater variety of sources comes a greater variety of research methods, and one would hope that, collectively, any poorly researched aspects of the story would be weeded out.
Now that we can reasonably assume the truthfulness of this development, we can now load the heaps of scorn on the Conference Board of Canada that it deserves.
