Truth and Bill Gates

UPDATED

CNet's interview with Bill Gates has any number of howlers, but a couple of them stand out.

He claims, for example, that Internet Explorer is the best browser. Insulting people's intelligence is par for the course for Gates, but this one is beyond laughable.

More serious, and ugly, is Gates' attack on people who want to restore a modicum of balance to today's grossly tilted system of intellectual property. He snidely dismisses "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."

The purity of this lie is remarkable. Even the most ardent of the free-software folks are not trying to remove the incentive to be creative. They believe in a different kind of incentive, just not the mercenary one that motivates Bill Gates.

The larger truth -- a principle for which Gates so frequently demonstrates such contempt -- is that the vast, vast majority of people who find fault with today's system still want to reward creators for their work, financially and otherwise. But we also want a system that balances the rights of creators with the rights and needs of the larger society.

Gates and his allies in the entertainment cartel want absolute control. For them, fair use and other societal benefits are what the intellectual property holders deem them to be. (And when it comes to patents, Gates and his company are becoming some of the worst bullies on the block, abusing a system that increasingly has little to do with actual innovation.)

Tonight I'm going to a party celebrating the second anniversary of Creative Commons, an organization that uses "private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses." That such an organization is needed so badly is testament to the outrageous imbalance in today's copyright regime.

Gates' defenders will claim that he was referring to a tiny group of people in his attack. But he's too smart, too media-savvy, not to have known what a broad brush he was wielding. His latest propaganda is shameful, but not a surprise.

UPDATE: BoingBoing has a couple of great postings pointing to "Creative Commies" art responding to Gates' crapola. See this and this.

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A commenter named Leo (see below) was puzzled about my comment that there are incentives to create other than mercenary motives. I responded:

There are many other incentives than financial ones. People volunteer their services all the time, not looking for payment (ever heard of the barn-raising or a volunteer fire department in a small town, for example?). People create art all the time without regard to payment. What's the business model for community theater? There isn't one in the standard sense. The purpose is to enrich a community's cultural life, and to give amateur actors a way to go on stage and fulfill something in their own lives.

The open-source software folks are similarly committed to producing something valuable without direct payment to themselves. Some are making a living off it by providing ancillary services. Others do it because they believe in the principle.

Grassroots journalism will rely in some ways on this concept. If the copyright cartel controls the distribution and the tools of creation -- has veto power over technology we need to make this happen -- then tomorrow's journalism will be partly stifled before it gets off the ground.

To follow the logic of people like Bill Gates, we should ban voluntarism because, after all, there are companies that would sell us the services. It's an absurd notion.

What's more, Bill Gates knows that markets fail. That why he's putting so much money into his philanthropy to help improve public health, especially in the developing world where markets have not worked. I greatly admire his commitment in that area.

Comments

[Brett Glass]

You write: Even the most ardent of the free-software folks are not trying to remove the incentive to be creative.

Not true, Dan. Richard Stallman -- the first and most rabid of this group -- specifically said that his purpose was to eliminate good paying jobs for programmers. Read his essay "The GNU Manifesto." His creation of the GPL -- and the propaganda surrounding it -- was a work of spite, alas.

[Dan Gillmor]

Brett, I think you're reading selectively from Stallman's writing. I'd suggest folks read it themselves to make up their own minds on this.

But even if he was saying what you claim (and, again, I don't think you're fairly characterizing what he wrote), it's not true that he's removing the incentive to be creative. At most, he'd be trying to remove just one kind of incentive. I think we can agree that there are other kinds.

[Mark Rosenthal]

It would be nice if Brett Glass actually read what Stallman wrote, rather than reporting what he'd like us to believe Stallman wrote. "The GNU Manifesto" is available for all to read at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html.

The relevant part is the section entitled "Won't programmers starve?" Stallman writes:

"I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. ... But that is the wrong answer because it accepts the questioner's implicit assumption: that without ownership of software, programmers cannot possibly be paid a cent. Supposedly it is all or nothing.

The real reason programmers will not starve is that it will still be possible for them to get paid for programming; just not paid as much as now. ...

Probably programming will not be as lucrative on the new basis as it is now. But that is not an argument against the change. It is not considered an injustice that sales clerks make the salaries that they now do. If programmers made the same, that would not be an injustice either. (IN PRACTICE THEY WOULD STILL MAKE CONSIDERABLY MORE THAN THAT. - (emphasis added))"

Brett is being astoundingly disingenuous, trying to blame the current dearth of decent software development jobs on the GPL, when Gates, Ellison, McNealy - champions of proprietary software, all - are all doing their level best to send as many decent-paying jobs overseas as they possbily can.

[c]

Understandi your feelings about Bill.

[bonehead]

avarice is the natural tendency of a free society and is politically expedient.fight it at your peril.....economic or otherwise.

[Fredric Alan Maxwell]

Dan, Gates calling something communist is the exact-same language Steve Ballmer used to describe Linux a few years ago, prompting MSFT's Chinese manager to quit. As far as Gates's claim about IE being the best, can there be any doubt that the Microsoft We-are-the-best-and-the-most-honest-software-company-on-the-planet disconnect continues?

[Sue C Kim]

I agree with your opnion. With bill gates theory, the envionment of society is cold, harsh and mistrust.

Well I can't express myself but I need somekind support.

I am one of his totured souls. I lost many jobs
because of him. With my name and social security
number I can not use any fax machines.

I would like to meet all the people who are
vitimized by him. I love to make somekind foundation for that.

[Brett Glass]

Stallman and Microsoft are two peas in a pod, actually. Both are unethical. Both want to destroy others' livelihoods by giving away what they make for a living for free.