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 t
…excerpt from: dangillmor.typepad.com…