Gates holds forth on Red Menace of IP law reform | The Register: “It must be wonderfully simple inside Bill Gates’ head. In the world outside the debate over patents and copyright may be raging, but at Bill Brain Central there’s no need for reform, the system works fine and is becoming more popular, and the opposition consists of ‘communists’ threatening the American Way.
Bill added this little gem to the Microsoft High Command’s collection of well-reasoned debating points (GPL is a cancer, it eats businesses, no, it eats whole economies, etc, etc) in an otherwise largely dull interview with CNET’s Michael Kanellos. Asked what’s driving the growing campaign for patent law reform, and whether he feels intellectual property laws need reforming, Gates responds:
‘No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.’”
Speaking as someone who’s licensing his own work under Creative Commons (I allow noncommercial derivative works), Gates couldn’t be more wrong. But it doesn’t surprise me that he doesn’t get it. Microsoft’s core problem since 1994 is that they didn’t see the internet coming and they have repeatedly overlooked cultural effects of the internet.
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