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Gates Elaborates on IP Communists
justin_w_hall writes "In part four of his interview with Gizmodo, big Bill Gates discusses his recent 'communist' labeling of supporters of free culture - and gets into detail about his rationale concerning Microsoft's position on DRM. Other parts of the interview: part 1, part 2, part 3."
He's actually kind of right. IN a comunist/socialist systme, the people own the code. (Since the people own everything.)
This is a refreshing contrast to the fascist model, where the state owns the code. In this case, the writers own the code.
If he says Linus is Stallin/lennin/marx, then he's Hitler by the same set of parameters.
-=fshalor
Wouldn't it be a bit more reasonable to put a time limiting factor on the copyright of songs ... after 20 years the song goes to the public domain, so that everyone can enjoy that music.
Part of Gates' argument is that in China prior to market reform, musicians were not paid. That's simply stupid. Anyone who knows anything about "Communist" regimes knows that all the ones that have existed, including China, still had money, and people got paid for their work (usually by the government). Now, you can certainly argue that musicians may not have been paid as *much* as they would have been in a market economy, but that's a different issue.
In a regular corporation, much of the capital becomes wealth distributed to executives who put it into their yacht fund, which in essence is punishing shareholders who are better served by reinvestment in the firm.
The same can be said for many industries. I think Americans underestimate, for example, how much of their healthcare spending goes into executive compensation, which is worse in that industry than most others. It makes you wonder how efficient capitalism really is in the endgame when most competitors have been washed out and locked out of the market.
And to Gizmodo? I'm surprised he even bothers to answer their phone calls at all!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
is what everybody thinks it is, as opposed to what it actually is. The ideas behind communism and democracy are very, very similar. Amish are communists in the purest sense of the word. It's just that COMMUNISM as we know is tied to Stalinist Russia, and modern China which have very little to do with the ideas of marxist communism.
You can legislate morally you can't legislate morality
Bill Gates is undoubtedly a smart guy, but in this interview he seems to have decided to follow the example of the current political administration - change the topic and pretend it is relevant. "The DRM we put into these systems is used to protect medical records, and it's used to protect things people want to protect." What a load of crap! I guess people are passing medical records around over bittorrent. That answer so far offtopic it's appalling, it's stupid, it's... bush-like. Oh, and he still calls open-source advocates communists.
He sounds like he's chewing on one already in many parts of that interview.
He wants to justify using DRM in music because its used for medical technologies. He's screwing up the point on purpose -- just because the OS knows about DRM for medical records doesn't mean MS has to acknowledge those "same bits" on music files at all.
If the laws in my country (Canada) allow me to make copies of the file, Windows had better let me.
Let me expound on that -- I work with a church that frequently uses short video clips to back up or emphasize a point; several clips were used from Shrek when discussing relationships, etc.
Under CCLI rules, we're allowed to use those clips without specific permission, during service time. However, to rip those clips, we need to use software that falls on the "hey, that's bad" side of Copyright regulations. Luckily, we don't have a DMCA in Canada.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
That part 4 interview is a perfect specimen of a spin artist in full spin mode.
The thing that stood out to me in the article was how billie seems to think people have no other incentive in innovating than profit. True innovators innovate for the challenge and because that's just what they LIKE doing. Profiting from it is just a side effect.
The part 3 interview, which is about XBox and everything evolving around that, has a bit of unintended humor in the first answer where Bill Gates appears to be championing for user choice and competition between vendors. Wow!
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
All we're doing is putting it in the platform. So I'm just saying, can you criticize us for having a platform that allows bits--bits, just bits; not music, not movies, not medical records, not tech things--to have any usage restriction for bits. Are we doing a disfavor to the world at large by saying some of our users, when they choose to--maybe for medical records--they can limit the accessibility of those bits?
Ah, but here is lies the classic folly. Currently, people have to decide if what they are doing is within the realms of fair use, such as copying a page from a book so they can cut out a favorite paragraph from the book and read it at presentation. DRM says that a machine has to decide if what I'm doing constitutes fair use. What happens when the computer doesn't understand my situation? Like with smart guns, if I'm wrestling with a criminal for their weapon and I manage to get it away from them, I won't be able to use it to defend myself! It's not just managing bits anymore Bill, it's managing our lives.
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
He says that money is the only insentive for individual excellence, or a step further, that DRM is the only way to reward creativity.
I believe many artists make art to add beauty to the world, and that they desire an audience, not money.
I believe that there are many artists willing to share their creative work for free, and they are compensated by the attention they get. I believe that the market is starting to demand this art. One of the great thing about this art, as with free software, is that it can be extended, collaborated with, and changed far beyond the scope of the original art. Perhaps this art isn't as good as commercial art, or as polished, but it has great advantages, the biggest one being that it is free.
Finally, having been a successful shareware author, I can say that people are very generous if you ask them for support. I could have never distributed my software through traditional channels, and would have never made any money even if I could have, but was quite successful freely distributing my work, and only asking for payment in the about box.
It is ironic that Bill Gates doesn't understand this. His operating system has started this revolution, that has removed the cost of distribution. What we are seeing now is a natural evolution of the personal computer.
You are missing his point. Communist is a trigger word. Like terrorist. It doesn't matter what it actually means he is using the word because he know how your typical american will react to it.
You are a communist. To the average american this means you belong in jail. That's what he is after.
evil is as evil does
but there has yet to be a true communist state. there have been plenty of totalitarian ones, however.
the pre-conditions for communism to arise are not met. there is not a surplus of necessities. we simply can not feed/cloth/house everyone. scarcity still exists, and as such, communism is an inefficient economic system.
and thats another point - communism is an economic system, not political.
... hi bingo
Poor Bill. He can't sleep at night thinking of impoverished Chinese musicians -- so he unleashes the Business Software Alliance to coerce entire nations to pony up more cash for Windows, all in the name of intellectual property. A regular advocate for the little guy, he is...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Specifically, it represents the "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" aspect of communism.
Microsoft, on the other hand, represents the "Central planning enforced via coercion from an unaccountable monopoly" aspect of communism.
If Gates & co. are going to try and keep the communism analogy alive, this more precise view ought to be brought up to reporters at every opportunity. I can't speak for everyone, but I know all my negative associations with Communism come from its relation to totalitarianism, not its relation to sharing.
Guess what, Windows will let you. What he is saying is this:
We didn't put the DRM on the content, the provider did, what we are doing is providing the way to get to the content.
Microsoft didn't put the DRM on your Shrek video, but they did give you the software to get at it.
I wish the people that bandy around terms like communist would stop and consider what these terms mean.
I am a worker (In my case an intellectual worker, but that doesn't matter) under both capitalism & communism I would be creating a product.
Under capitalism I create something, and I can sell it or give it away as I wish. It doesn't matter if that something is a wooden table or a computer program. It's my choice what I do with it.
The person I sell/gift it to can do with it as he or she wishes.
In other words, my product is covered by a BSD licence.
Under communism everything (including the fruits of my labours) belongs to "the people", in other words "the state". I make something, the state pays me a wage and it determies how and by whom the product is used.
Under capitalism (as described by Marx) competitive pressure forces the price of commodity goods down towards the cost of production. The producers can only make a profit by reducing their cost of production, including wages, to a minimum.
What's the true commodity cost of software? The cost of downloading and perhaps the cost of burning it to a CD.
Under communism, the state restricts competition, and interferes in the market, thus keeping the price of commodities high enough to ensure a decent wage for the workers.
The exact mechanism for how it restricts competition isn't that relevant. It could be "5 year plans" stating exactly how many will be produced, it could be limiting the number of people permitted to make the product, or it could be changing the patent rules to permit patenting the product rather than the old "patenting the process" model.
Under communism you have the state creating or enforcing monopolies on the production of commodity items. It doesn't matter if those items are cornflakes or software, the prices are kept artificially high to permit "the workers" to keep more of the wealth.
Looking to the USSR experiment, "the workers" that retained the wealth weren't so much the ones on the factory floor as the managers & the communist functionaries that replaced the former owners, but no-one can argue that the upper echelons of the society of the USSR were wealthy.
Communism, even in the unadulterated Stalinist form, fails to deal with a singular thing; human greed. Humans, as a social animal, view accumulation of wealth as an important means of achieving social status. Whether it's cows, dollars, beads, clam shells or ferrous oxide pigments on the forehead, it all amounts to one thing, we are a greedy species.
If you attempt to replace that, you only end up creating new kinds of wealth to accumulate, new social strata to which the ambitious will strive.
The industrialized world has worked out a basically mixed system with social safety nets to (theoretically) catch the most vulnerable members of society, without trying to make wealth accumulation some sort of wicked vice. It's far less than perfect, but then again, to expect perfection, to even theorize it, is just plain silly. Any economic theory that ignores our basic nature is doomed to either quick failure or to be taken over by people of less-than-pure motives.
Quite frankly I simply don't buy into the class struggle nonsense. I don't have any jealousy of Gates' billions, I just want a legal system that can clamp down on his gaining it via shady means. I don't want to pick the Rockefellers' pockets, but I think as a society we can do more to help those in economically vulnerable positions. But I don't think that means throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I see nothing in Communism that is so desirable that I should see it as a reasonable alternative to a mixture of free market capitalism and socialistic safety nets.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Guess what, Windows will let you. What he is saying is this:
We didn't put the DRM on the content, the provider did, what we are doing is providing the way to get to the content.
Microsoft didn't put the DRM on your Shrek video, but they did give you the software to get at it.
That is totally Mr. Gates' point and I think he makes it well. I don't love his company or his business practices, however I agree with him here. He is not putting the DRM on the content. He is not suing people for getting around it. He is simply implementing the tool.
You'll have that sometimes...
His argument is the same as it always is: If you don't give me your money, you won't be able to do what you want. It's hard to pull that out of that rambling BS piece, but the argument is there. In a nutshell it is, you must accept my DRM or "authors" (I think he really means big media publishers) won't let you have their content. In this case he further's his argument by telling you that you never had the rights you thought you did if the "author" decides you don't have it. Once again, he pretends he wishes to reward others for their work. As usual, he tries to shore it all up with insults, "communist" this time but he's always called his customers "theives". You can see the same arguments from him all the way back in 1976
The key quotes are:
What we want is to have as much content as possible available. ... an envelope ... in order to get authors to be willing to put an ever broader range of content on our platform ... there's content that can only be there if it's rights protected ...
DRM is just like a speed bump that reminds you whether you're staying within the scope of rights that you have or you don't.
This is an astoundingly dishonest position at every level. The fact of the mater is that authors ARE putting their work up on the Creative Commons for everyone to use without restrictions. They don't want Mr. Gate's "protection". They want to compete on their merits and publish in a normal, and easy to use way. Surely, authors have enough sense to know that the control they pass onto big publishers through DRM will be lost to them forever. Right now the RIAA can threaten to keep your work off air and out of stores. Can you imagine the power music publisher would have if they could throw a few bits in their database and prevent your music from working anywhere? Not even the big publisher's believe that they will remain in control of their rights if they lend Microsoft their trust.
Mr. Gates and his DRM scheme are not "enablers" of any sort. His and big media's expansion of copyright and other forms of government granted exclusive franchises are the reason we have more consolidated and stagnant media than ever. When you give your money to this man, you hurt your rights in every way. If you use his software, he owns your system. Now he wants to own your media too. No thanks, I do just fine without him or his software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ya, I know I can rip DVD's using DVDShrink. However, would that have been possible if someone hadn't cracked the CSS on the disks? Do you think that the authors of the DVDShrink program recieved a license from the controlling organization of that system in order to distribute, for free, a program that lets you rip movies from an encrypted disk? Do you think the movie industry wants to let you backup your disks, or do you think they'd rather have you destroy/rebuy the movie every time something bad happens?
Perhaps I'm not thinking of the program you're refering to. Maybe we're talking about the Movie Maker program in XP? Didn't think that one would let you sample a DVD for inclusion in another presentation, but I haven't tried. How about something else?
For what it's worth, it's my belief that such programs as DVDShrink violate the DMCA as they break the encryption that is intended to protect the content. Frankly, I don't care as I see the DMCA as an overreaching law that forbids fair use and blocks content that is encrypted from ever being brought into the public domain (how can you get it out if cracking the encryption is a crime?). That's another argument, though.
No, Microsoft didn't tell the member of the MPAA that they needed to use CSS encoded DVDs to distribute such movies as Shrek. However, they did their part in implimenting that standard. As I understand, they are also seeking to encourage the music industry right now that the WMA format with it's DRM (a feature available before the content is encoded in it) is a secure way to distribute their content. Know what that means? Microsoft is leading that push, not the content creators.
Microsoft certainly cannot encourage companies that it's implimentation of DRM is safe and effective if they provide programs that enable fair use (which they don't). It sure would be nice if they would, but I won't hold my breath waiting for the computer industry and the content industry to come to an agreement regarding the proper implimentation of the conflicting notions of software-enforced copyright protection and fair use.