Michael Geist, the Canadian law professor and anti-copyright hero, has posted an analysis of how copyright lobbying relies on

a clear strategy of deploying seemingly independent organizations to advance the same goals, claims, arguments, and recommendations. Over the past three years, this strategy has played out with multiple reports, each building on the next with a steady stream of self-citation.

This kind of analysis should be done more often in policy development. The use of self-referential key documents with overlapping contributors is probably pretty common, and not necessarily sinister. It’s a good case study of how advocacy groups can create a sense of momentum with relatively few papers and organizations that look independent but aren’t. However, it can also lead to bad policy based on an insufficient research base, as in the case of the emerging international copyright laws.