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Gates Nose-Dives at CES
Lots of submissions this morning about Bill Gates' performance at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. His Media Center PC presentation crashed. (The presentation is online.) He also gave an interview to CNET, where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists". Boingboing has some commentary on that interview as well.
I wish they'd stop developing new, useless BS out at Microsoft and get to work on bug fixes.
I'm going to accuse them of being modern day capitalists.
Sounds just as bad to me.
It would *REALLY* be nice to see someone in the media finally get this right.
SB:
Is it me or does Gates seem to be very out of touch with what is going on in the real world and mostly seems to be getting his current information from his "Human Search Engines". Not to mention the fact he is constantly doing little more then plugging Micro$oft products.
Just remember: If you don't buy from Micro$oft you are a Communist!
Use his influence with the federal government to tie the open source effort with terrorism. Terrorism is the new communism. Cloak anything you don't like in terrorism and it gets done. Couple that with this administration's ability to be bought off by corporate interests and he can get what he wants. OK, mod me down now.......
From the interview, on the topic of search engines:
Oh, sure, everybody is working on those things, but just take the idea of finding your local pizza place and doing that right; search doesn't do that well today.
Sounds like someone needs to clue Bill in to using Sherlock under OS X -- that's exactly what I used it for yesterday.
--saint
I, for one, welcome our new copyleft communist masters (and logo).
[rant]
Seriously, Bill Gate and Co. continue to try and paint anyone who doesn't agree with their stance on IP as un-American. Who died and made him J. Edgar Hoover, Jr.?
America was NOT founded on the principles of IP but on freedom of choice (religious and otherwise) and the idea that everyone is supposed to contribute to the public good. The recent push to IP, patent, and copyright every little "innovation" (think one-click)is what is hurting our ability to produce something new and better without having to wade through a morass of legalities.
I will continue to support copyleft, OSS, and any other program that contributes to the dissemination of knowledge and ideas.
[/rant]
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists".
But... doesn't sharing mean caring? At least that's what my parents always said.
In all seriousness, there's nothing wrong with a communial society, it's just really really hard to pull off because of human nature.
Sometimes, all it takes is one comment. If Bush comes out on public television and makes one strong line of pure and clear racial charged comment against minority groups. Do you think everyone will say, well, using one comment against him is just propaganda?
.segmond
a) Calling free culture advocates commies shows a... slight misunderstanding of the two ideologies. At its best, Communism was never particularly concerned with the individual (possibly why it is so successful in the Confucian environment of China).
b) Arguing that "Communist" is not a pejorative is likely to go down like a lead balloon in much of America. The McCarthy witchhunts were ludicrous but they happened for a reason. Communists *were* the enemy - defending them carries the same overtones as defending Naziism to the French.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
I find it offensive to associate the GPL with a form of government that's responsible for killing many millions of people.
Are you aware of a major form of government that is NOT responsible for killing millions of people?
Finkployd
Now to me, this doesn't sound like propoganda, but rather, who he actually is.
Actually, isn't a government granted monopoly (copyright) and "incentives" more communist than capitalist? Do we really need to pour millions of dollars into the pockets of the recording industry and artists? I mean, I accept the premise that entertainment is worth money, but when one organization controls the distribution channels, content, and advertisement, where's the competition?
I find it offensive to associate the GPL with a form of government that's responsible for killing many millions of people.
Come on... People have killed more in the name of religion, but that doesn't make the concept of religion a bad thing (or, to give an example, a cross is a perfectly fine symbol). The sad thing about communism was that in some countries it delved into dictatorships and so on. Some countries have a more palatable socialistic governments that are doing pretty fine.
It is sad though that Bill Gates thinks that by associating GPL with an "american taboo word of the 20th century," he can accomplish something. Now, he seems to be taking the role of Steve Ballmer. May be time to see Bill Gates jumping up and down screaming "Developers... Developers... Communists... Develpers..".
S
To paraphrase the NRA member logic: Governments don't kill people, people kill people. The communist form of government had little to do with killing people. It ultimately fell victim to a human trait called greed. The people in power in the former soviet states felt that they were more equal than others. If you ask me, I will tell you that our capitalist republic is failing in the same exact way. The only difference is that with capitalism, the PR machine has better beads and trinkets. Now before anyone jumps on me to tell me that capitalism is an economic model and communism is a political model, don't forget that in communism, the economic model is defined by the political model. Here in the U.S. the economic model is also defined by the political model, but the balance is different. Here the economic model has more power than the political model. And those people who would have been high ranking politicos in the U.S.S.R. are instead CEOs in our corporations. Very effective way of attempting to take over the world without letting things like politics and ethics get in the way.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
>Using one comment against him his just propoganda.
This is not one comment. This is him openly claiming:
1. The current IP system is what makes America great. Yes, that's what he's saying.
2. The current IP system doesn't need reform, except perhaps making better patent systems. Note Microsoft has been dealing with Eolas and others regarding patents so Bill is only seeing the light only when it serves his company.
3. He calls those who call for IP reform "new communists." That's just an insult and trivializes the real concerns many have with using the law (think DMCA and others) to maintain monopoly status and crack down on how one can use one's machine and software.
He spoke like a perfect monopolist. He knows IP laws help him and help maintain the status quo, thus creating a nice and healthy (for him) barrier to entry. He only diverged from the party-line when it came to patents and it should be obvious why.
Of course, he may be right about patent reform, but its soley in his interest and in the interest in his monopoly, comrade.
I will give MS credit, they are the perfect monopolists. Perfect. No wonder he uses such outdated and misused terms like "communism." MS has shown that ruthlessness pays off and Bill might be seeing himself as Ayn Rand, say versus Karl Marx, when he's just an old fashioned monopolist. Monopolies are of course, a symptom of a market failure or corruption. This is called irony.
I find this rhetoric to be common amongst the wealthy business class and conservatives in general. Such as: Commies! X makes America great! Sure there will always be a debate on Y, but lets not jump to conclusions! etc
There is communism (insane totalitarianism found in USSR and an earlier China) but they never achieved that Marx wrote about. No "government" ever has (In the '60's and '70's people had communes, but they always broke apart on the shoals of human nature). The people who started "communist" revolutions never completed the process. I don't call those insane assholes "communists", they are insane oligarchs, just like the Czarist regime before them.
There was a time when the new government in this continent did something that had not been done before or since: They *gave up power*, placing that power in the hands of people. Since then, the concept has fallen on hard times. Today, we have oligarchs like Mr. Gates trying to restore Traditional Values: Own and control access to *fucking everything*. And they have enough financial resources to buy off what passes for government these days. And the only people doing anything about it (in information technology, they are FOSS advocates) eschew government and political process. Too busy writing actual reliable code, I suppose...
I don't like arbitrary authority, so I don't like big centralized government. On the other hand, I cannot think of another way to slow down the assholes who want to charge me for the privilege of working (using "their" "intellectual" "property"). It's a dilemma that I don't know how to resolve.
Note that capitalism is not about monopolies. In fact, capitalism relies on free market, and you can't have free market if one of the players controls a majority of it.
The basic ideas of capitalism work just insanely effective. When we had communism in Poland, most shops had empty shelves -- and within just months after the communism's fall any shortages were just gone, as if by a wave of a magic wand.
On the other hand, communism is based on monopoly. It's supposed to be a monopoly of the "working class", but in reality in all cases it turned out to be a monopoly of the Party. And then, if you can buy the Party's blessing -- you can have a monopoly in your sector, too!
Whatever you say, you can't ignore the fact that all real-life implementations of communism were based on the control the Party had on the citizens. In fact, it's the control what the communism is about.
So... we have a company who tries to gain the sole control of a sector of industry -- and it's them who dare to call their enemies communists.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
"Anarchist government" is an oxymoron. True anarchy arises from lack of order spontaneously, and a lot of scores get settled with blood. Everyone: the US killed over 300,000 Filipinos alone in the Spanish-American war. We've killed 12,000-100,000 in Iraq; the exact number is classified. "Communism" didn't kill anyone any more than our "democracy" has. Nothing about the theories demand you murder people. The ideologies don't kill. People kill. Stalin and Lenin killed millions for political and economic advantage, and we are killing for the same reasons now. And the Russians thought they were defending their motherland and freedom as well. And were as deluded as we are now, for the exact same reasons.
where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists".
Does this make Bill Gates a communist? Xerox and Apple had windows before Microsoft. TCP was borrowed from Digital. Sun for RPCs and J#. Supercalc and other had spead sheets before Microsoft. Does work perect or others get roaylties rom Word for the word processor?
In fact, Linux uses X for it's windows which predates Microsoft. Maybe Microsoft should pay royalties to commercial UNIX and Linux for the RTU of Windows.
And look at Microsoft's legal track record.
This was obviously a hypocritical comment on Bill's part. A typical reaction to a monoplistic looser.
"Fly the [boing!boing! USSR/Copyleft] flag with pride comrades!"
NONONONONO!!! I know you're trying to be funny, but I'm not laughing... The last thing free software proponents need is to associate themselves with a failed economic ideology that has resulted in tens of millions of unnecessary deaths worldwide. Free Software has nothing to do with statist communism and everything to do with individual freedom of association and collaboration. When Bill Gates frames the debate between the capitalists on his side and communists on the other, the last thing to do is embrace the presuppositions of his frame! Down that road evokes an ideological wasteland of failure! Do copyleft supporters want to associate themnselves with that? --M
Ok, so I'm going to go a little bit off topic here, but gates implies that if you support free software, then you are a communist, the thing of it is, I'm not sure how exactly this is a bad thing.
Capitalism and Communism are each at opposite ends of a scale of scarcity- that is to say, Capitalism works great when there is a limited amount of stuff to go around, relative to the population size. It encourages effeciency and results in a population as a whole getting the most of what it wants from a limited pool of resources. Communism on the other hand is ideal for a world where, relative to the population size, resources are unlimited, or at least nearly unlimited. In the perfect theoreticaly communist society, the only limit to how much of something that can be made is the number of people available to make it.
Socialism is basically just the name given to the middle ground.
Now, capitalism is great for a lot of things, because as a society/country/planet today in many areas our resources are still finite. For many aspects of our world, capitalism is still the best thing we've come up with to deal with the limited resources we have, relative to the world population.
In the world of software however, we have a situation which is more closely related to the communist ideal world. Once a program is written it can be copied over and over again essentially for free. In this case, the only limit to the software that can be developed is the amount of skilled people who are able to work on it.
Looking at it like that, what I see when gates says people who support free software are communists is really his admission that we are using a superior philosophy for our little section of reality.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
The irony of Bill Gates' anti-communist rhetoric in the wake of his recent crash and burn presentation on Windows Media Center is that Microsoft itself resembles a creaky Soviet-era state-run monopoly much more than a lean, mean emblem of free-trade capitalism.
In my opinion Microsoft is essentially a state-sponsored monopoly and, as such, represents, little more than a tweaked version of the classic communist state entity.
The rational for this position is the simple fact that although Microsoft has been found guilty of being a monopolistic barrier to free-trade in the software industry it was given tacit state sanction to operate as such when the courts and the DOJ failed to press for meaningful controls on their business practices.
From an objective perspective this is no more than a refined version of the classic communist state monopoly. Like Soviet era monopolies Microsoft must compete in the international market as a representative of the State economy while at home it is given tacit control of the market in exchange for loyalty to the political leadership. Also like Soviet era monopolies, state pressure for reform of business practices amounted to little reform but a large increase in the amount of money passed on to corrupt politicians. Take a look at Microsoft's political contributions post-trial and I think you'll see this pattern is quite obvious.
What's worse is that this "tweaked" form of state control can be conducted legally through Political Action Committees with little need to resort to passing money under the table as occurred in the old Soviet Union.
That's right folks, Microsoft's brand of communism is conducted right under your noses while real innovation and competition in the software industry is systematically squashed through monopolistic trade practices tacitly sanctioned by the state. It's high time that all you Democrats and Republicans out there swallow the blue pill and see things as they are, not how you want them to be. Either we believe in free trade or not and no matter how you dice it monopolies are antithetical to free trade. Those who acquire them will always attempt to redefine competition so that the rules don't apply to them. Ooogedy boogedy people! Look-out! International competition means we have to stick together and support our local monopoly. Oh no! Look over there people, those communist are trying to wreck our good capitalist monopoly. It's total nonsense if you just step back and take a look at it for what it really is.
But I'll just add one more comment, trying to deconstruct what Gates says about communism and IP:
I don't read replies by ACs.
It really is rediculous all around. Bill neglects to carefully consider that the GPL and other open source licenses are simply gifts of intellectual property to the community at large. In no way does the GPL or BSD licenses "disrespect" commercial licenses, they just offer a better value than the commercial licenses, ie., our software is our gift to you.
However, anti-copyright is not socialist, because socialism is ENFORCED public sharing/ownership. The absence of copyright means that there's no legal protection for works, not that you're required to share them. (As an aside: patents as well as registered copyrights require disclosure["sharing"] as a requirement).
The RIAA is an industry organization made up of record labels. It doesn't directly interact with artists in any way, but people (at least on Slashdot) will refer to "the RIAA" when they mean "record labels and/or the music industry as a whole", as well as the RIAA per se. Any artist with any signifigant amount of distribution (ie, outside their home county) will have to sign with an RIAA member, because record labels control access to all the major means of distribution - you won't get your album into stores and you won't get radio play without a record deal with a major label. One more note: despite there being a whole shit-ton of record labels, they're mostly subsidaries or imprints of each other. There's a fairly small set of people who control the music industry and while they compete with each other to a degree, they mostly collude.
In summary: Grandparent is wrong to call copyrights communist (or socialist), but your rebuttal is equally wrong pretty much everywhere.
Seriously, a fair bit of what he says really sits uncomfortably. For one thing what he says about IE and Firefox is, although perfectly true, not quite as clear-cut as he seems to be making it sound.
That's not exactly by choice in all cases. I am confident that were IE trivially uninstallable from a Windows setup then that point would be less valid.
I don't necessarily think that every FF user would uninstall IE if it were easily doable but I do think that in many of the cases where "IE is also on those systems" it's only because there's no simple way of remiving it.
As for his stance on IP rights then I think he hasn't got a clue.
However what I will say is that I'm no businessman and he runs a very successful business. So I freely admit that as much as I disagree with his points of view they obviously work in business. In fact I'd be pretty surprised if he didn't have views like that - many businesses seem to share the "IP Rights are Good" mentality.
Having said that I do think that what's good for business isn't always good for innovation and incentive. And that's why I personally think that the concept of "Intellectual Property" needs a major overhaul. Patents and non-terminating copyrights simply have too many drawbacks.
Like the main incentive for Patents that companies seem to have is that if they have a great idea then not only should they benefit from selling it but they shoudl benefit from anyone improving on it - as they'll have to pay to license it. Great from a business perspective but from a technical perspective this is dreadful because if someone's got great dieas to extend something but no money or Patents to bargain with then the new idea will be lost.
Obviously I find it a bit odd when Bill Gates (or anyone Microsoft spokeperson) talks about things "working together". Unless they're having a complete turnaround in their policies he probably means that when "devices work together" they will always be working via Windows.
Obviously this makes a great quote as he goes down as saying that interoperability is important - or something like that - but it just falls flat as more often than not he isn't tlaking about devices talking with non-Microsoft devices.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
On the whole, religion has killed more people than all forms of revolution and all wars over money, gold or resources.
Learn something new.
That's very true, and I'd mod you up if I werent responding to your comment.
BUT, you have to acknowledge that Soviet-style Communism isn't really Communism, it's totalitarianism. USA-style democracy isn't really democracy, either, but that's another matter...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
What *is* interesting is the so-called "world's greatest software company" has a demo crash on their most public figure, and that he resorts to anachronistic political labels for buttressing his argument.
First off: retaliation is not defense, no matter how many times national leaders claim it is. When it happens on a small scale people recognize this, I don't get why peoples brains stop working when we talk about religions and nations. There also was more than one, so stop talking about it in the singular.
Second: Where did you learn about the Inquistion? Torquemada's Revision of The Truth School for Retards? The mandate of the Inquisition was the exposure and punishment of heresy. Confession by torture was common place. There's been more than one (and in fact the order of the Inquisition still exists today) and it's not always been about blood and torture and burning but it absolutely DID happen and it WAS under the mandate of the Church and trying to claim that it was about creating fair trials for heretics is so ridiculous it makes my brain hurt. The fact that Church was very heavily involved in secular governments at the time does mean you can always claim it "wasn't about religion", but it's pedantic and silly nitpicking at best, dishonest at worst - you can just define any behavior you don't approve as not about religion, even when religiously motivated and done at the behest of religions authority. The Church was a major secular power in the Middle Ages, something that's hard for people to comprehend now - it had it's own armies, it's own banks, and it essentially ruled huge swaths of land even larger numbers of people. It had it's own courts (yes, of Inquisition) and would try and condemn people purely on it's own authority as well as that of the local rulers. Some rulers didn't allow the Inquisition into thier lands, those rulers faced excommunication. To claim that all this was done in the "name" of religion rather than "for" religion is missing the point.
But whose choice is that to make? Your choice (or the peoples)? What gives you the right to decide how much Brittney Spears and her organizations want to charge for their own creation? Or should we let the gov't choose the price?
With available tech people steal the material. If people are legally allowed to steal the material (now it is not stealing, it is just taking for free) - they will do so. In all honesty - how many people are going to pay for something, when they can get it for free legally? Hell how many people out there pay for something when they can take it illegally with little risk of capture?
It is not our property - we did not make it, we have ZERO say. It is like if I knit a sweater. I can charge nothing for it(give it away), I can charge 5 bucks or I can charge 5,000 bucks. My choice. Your choice is to pay or not pay for it. If i see that people are not buying my sweaters I can either reduce the price or leave it as is. Again I have a choice to sell at the price that I want to sell, you have the choice to buy it or not. I can't see why this concept is so hard to grasp?
Please note I am not trying to incite you to anger, I am just trying to figure out why people have a problem with someone setting a price that they want on their property.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
One key difference between Communism and Capitalism is the existence of a middle class in Capitalism.
Let's keep it that way. The middle class is currently shrinking in a dramatic way. The upper class is not growing appreciably, but they are making more money. The poor class, on the other hand, is growing. This suggests a shift of power away from the middle class to the upper class. This is not a good thing. As the powerful amass more power, they will abuse it to the detriment of everybody else. That is why power should reside in the largest segment of the population as possible -- to help ensure that as few people as possible face abuse from the rest of society.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
Because some people have figured out that intellectual property is not property. It is non-rivalrous, can be reproduced at negligible cost, and it cannot be stolen (ie. you cannot be criminally convicted for theft of IP). In other words it has none of the characteristics of real property.
IP is a legal monopoly on ideas, which is enforced through contracts and civil law (ie. license agreements). Only businessmen attempting to invent a market by means of a false scarcity call it "property".
See here if you're really trying to figure this out.
Come on, the deaths caused by Communism were a result of Religious Fervor.
I'm really short on time so I can't fully reply to all of these messages, or even to you. But I'm really not debating the underlying ideologies of communism, capitalism, or even religious expression. I'm talking about a cultural taboo against communism which continues in western cultures today. Look at the success of the Swift Boat Vets red baiting the Kerry campaign as a prime example; McCarthyism continues fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union and fifty years after McCarthy's downfall.
If the Free Software movement willingly accepts Gate's frame as being inspired by communist utopian idealism, the debate is over. Gate's will have won by default. If any of those EFFers or Project GNU folks are listening here (right - *cough*) I would recommend framing project GNU and BSD ideals by referencing simple down-to-earth small town values like church bake sales, community volunteer firefighting, and the Salvation Army. These are examples of community cooperation everyone can understand. And when Gates (or his surrogates) compares writing free software to communist destruction of capitalist intellectual property rights, argue back that his argument is like destroying the church bake sale for the profit-rights of local restaurants. That is an frame which skewer his debate talking points.
This is not about communist or capitalist ideology, this is about manipulating public opinion in order to promote - long term - a specific political agenda in Washington. Realize that and all this ideological bullshit smoke disappears like evenscent fog clearing on a sunny day.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Props to Conan for his good improv skills and ability to work a crowd, but doesn't it say something weird about our age that Microsoft itself can't keep its own product from going down at a major technology trade show, and that the crowd finds this acceptable, even funny? Remember, Microsoft's product is on warships these days. Would the crowd have also been yucking like a bunch of doped-up Amsterdam tourists if this had been wargames off the coast of England, and HMS Windows had given them a GPF when they tried to launch a missile? Please, boys: don't believe your own hype, and for God's sake, don't let anybody with a pulse take Ballmer seriously for a nanosecond.
I am saying that it should be the IP's owners decision, not anyone elses decision, to set the price.
I believe the creator of the content should have the decision to set the price for their work. And they do.
But, the reality of copying and recording technology means that they really only have the right to set the price for the very first copy of their work.
This is much like centuries ago when, after a great composer allowed their work to be performed, it was possible for musicians with good ears and memory to copy down a transcription of a great piece of music.
That it was possible to do this was regarded as reality.
If laws that distort the market by granting exclusive rights to sell duplicated information are reformed, then we might well have artists that would be paid by enough fans getting money together for induce them to perform a First Performance, since that is the only service for which they inherently ought to have the right to charge for. They are permitted to set the price for this First Performance as they wish, they can refuse to play unless the price is to their liking, and they can refuse to perform in the presence of recording equipment. All of those choices are the right of the content creator and I believe those rights should be preserved.
But, when I copy one file of bits to another on my computer and email it to a friend and RIAA demands payment, it's an artificial distortion of the market. Next thing you know, the authors of child-rearing advice books will want cameras in my home to help them charge me in case I actually use on their copyrighted techniques for child-rearing.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I think it is more that some people are trying to make IP not property.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
"Intellectual Property" is a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it? Property means something that one possesses, and it is very difficult to possess something that only exists in someone's head, in my opinion.
Historically, (as far as I can tell) people have not wrangled so much over the ownership of ideas. It only, as you say, since people have started investing so much money into ideas, to be later confronted with better copying techniques, that this has been a problem. Patrons of the art, for instance, have always existed, but generally have not expected a return on their investments. Nowadays, the patrons are all record producers and software companies and the like.
Did it ever occur to you that it is insane to invest millions of dollars into an intangible work? Probably not, because the industry has us trained to believe that that is normal. You are probably worried that without the current industry there would not be new games and books and recordings. But remember that artists have always worked for thousands of years, and that this industry structure is less than a hundred years old.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
A rose by any other name is still a rose. I think then the argument is over the name... People hate assigning the word property to non-tangeable products. But why can't property be applied to non-tangeable products.
According to dictionary.com
Something tangible or intangible to which its owner has legal title: properties such as copyrights and trademarks.
IP is not physical property, but it is as real as money. Why is it so hard to apply the same thought process we do about money to copyrightable material? That hundred dollar bill is a piece of paper worth less then a penny, but we assign it a great value. You say that because something is not tangeable it is not property? I have some money in the bank - not tangeable at the moment...is that not my property?
Why can't criminal law on theft of tangible property be applied to non-tangible? Because we say so? Because the old laws do not support it? Since when do people in the tech industry, one of the fastest changing industries if not the fastest, resist change to old ideas?
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
It's like if you knit a sweater and people, because of new technology, are able to make perfect copies of it at little or no cost. That is good. That is why we developed technology. That's why the the Constitution seeks to "promote the progress of science and useful arts."
Now that we have this technology we should be allowed to use it. You have been deprived of nothing. You still have your sweater. And we all have sweaters too. You can still sell your sweater, and if it's any good you can probably get a good price for it as an "orignal" (kinda like getting good ticket prices for a live concert).
Wake up man! If groceries started growing on trees would you cry for the grocery stores that went out of business? No. They would find new ways to contribute to society and all of us would be the richer.