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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."
"No, no, no. I didn't say those people were 'communists.' I did say that they're... 'dirty Marxist pinko communist reds that should be herded into camps and executed en masse.' I hate being misquoted and hope this clears up any misunderstanding."
I for one Welcome our Communist Free Culture Overlords...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
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
"I really meant to say Nazis. My bad."
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 now, the long running attempt at a joke has FINALLY achieved humor value.
No use of it after today will ever be as fit, amusing or appropriate. Anyone else who uses the joke will remind readers of this instance of it, and they'll think "Yea, but it's still lame and stale compared to Kjuib's masterful use of the gag."
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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.
Gates isn't smart, he's desperate. MSFT has barely nudged +/- $3 over the past four years while the rest of the tech market has taken off (particularly old rival AAPL). They're getting desperate in their smear campaign because its all about $$$...its become practically impossible to make MSFT rise with straight financials or new products, so they are trying mudslinging.
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."
Have you or have not you ever contributed code to the communist operating system, Linux?
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
Programmers write free software to subvert a system that denies them the protection of their intellectual property rights by pricing legal defense of those rights out of their reach. That guys like Gates would be unsympathetic to this cruel dilemma facing the vast majority of programmers is not surprising. Indeed, given the fact that even giving all his wealth away, except some "modest" estate for his children, his childre will still be able to afford good legal counsel to establish protection for themselves.
If programmers were able to capture enough of the value of what they write to pay for the legal defense of their rights they'd probably write a lot less free software.
This gets to a fundamental problem with the incentives created by taxing things other than asset value (exempting house and tools of the trade which are subsistence assets protected by bankruptcy tradition):
Possession is rewarded over creation.
Think about it: Once you possess something, you basically have no tax burden. You enjoy the benefits of young men dutifully going out to die in wars, government subsidized infrastructure paid by wage earners, the entire legal edifice describing and protecting your rights and without you having to pay a cent. You can just soak the public for these benefits by paying only the lawyers fees to extract the benefits for yourself.
Taxing everything but possession (income, capital gains, sales, value added, etc) is just a way to tax the creative process.
Naturally, creators who are trying to get a leg up on the situation end up selling their creations cheap to those whose possession is subsidized by the tax payments of the creators.
Well, there is one exception to this rule of no taxation of possession -- and that is the patent maintanence fee. Patents are the only assets that the government taxes. This is an incredibly regressive tax hitting hardest those who are earliest to support the realization of a new technology's value -- forcing them to sell their rights ("assign") cheap to someone who has been sitting around enjying the government's protection.
It all adds up to a very nasty way of sucking capital out of the hands of creators and giving over to the hands of possessors.
So the creators, unable to change the tax laws to tax assets rather than creative processes (becuse they can't buy the Ways and Means Committee) become socialists.
This is directly related to the issue of outsourcing since if programmers who had created the value of the information industry had been allowed to retain the value they created, they wouldn't need jobs. The corporations would be paying them royalties or be paying companies owned by the programmers for the rights to their software instead of just throwing creators out on the street after extracting their youth and creativity.
A system that would work would elimnate all existing taxes (although not necessarily tariffs) and just tax net assets at a rate equal to the interest rate on the national debt -- exempting from taxation the same assets that are exempted by personal bankruptcy protection: home and tools of the trade.
Does Gates think he can beat the competition if they aren't beaten down for him by the government? This sort of arrogance by people who are the wealthiest isn't offset by giving their money to charity. They are eating the children of the middle class and destroying the future of the country that made them rich.Seastead this.
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.
There is no reason that democracy and capitalism go together.
It has been demonstrated, in many different countries, that Capitalism and Totalitarianism/Fascism/Monarchies can go hand in hand.
Why then, is communism limited to only totalitarian regimes?
If the majority in a democracy vote for a communst-style economic plan, why is this less feasible than creating laws to respect capitalistic rights?
To go further: The USSR was not a communistic economy, it was a centrally-planned economy, under a totalitarian government.
The US, during WW2, was a centrally planned economy, under a democratic government.
I see no coupling of economic and political systems.
... hi bingo