Bill Gates has a few words to say about the Creative Commons folks on CNET:
CNET: In recent years, there’s been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, “We’ve got to look at patents, we’ve got to look at copyrights.” What’s driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
Gates: No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are 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.
And this debate will always be there. I’d be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned–including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we’ve had the best intellectual-property system–there’s no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they’ve got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future.”
I like Bill Gates.
UPDATE: Professor Lessig, the guy who writes all those “The Sky Is Falling” Internet books, is sad, and Boing-boing makes drawings to show how very hip they are.
Well, Richard, you can like Bill Gates or not, I guess. I don’t hate the man, but I think he’s a bit off base on this one.
The thing is, we already have patent and copyright laws. Yes, Gates is right, they should be respected, the better to give people the incentive to produce. The problem is that those laws no longer so much serve to induce creation as to choke off innovation, what with their absurdly long terms (at least for copyrights). Copyrights originally lasted only for 14 years. Then they could be renewed for another 14 years. Then they lasted for 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. That much is fine, but now copyrights are life-of-the-author plus 75 years, which is too frickin’ long. Not only are they in effect unenforceable– do you really think that anybody is going to prosecute a copyright-violation regarding the song, “Achy Breaky Heart” in the year 2113, 70 years after the artist’s death in, say, 2043??– such long copyrights serve to choke off innovation by locking up music and other arts in a fashion that makes it impossible for other artists to tinker with in order to come up with something new, or seemingly so. Go read the short story “Melancholy Elephants”, by Spider Robinson, to get an idea of what I mean.
Incentive to produce, yes. Perpetual copyright, for all practical purposes for those now living or soon to be born, no.
Bill Gates and the IP mavens need to remember that they’re merely mortal, Richard.
Sorry, I had one other point I forgot to make:
Law is ultimately a matter of custom as it is statute. Just as juries can refuse to convict a man of breaking a law the jury views as unjust, we the people shape what laws actually get “respect” by choosing to obey them if they make sense to us, or not obeying them if they seem onerous.
Gates and company can preach all they want about protecting IP rights, but if the laws protecting those rights seem to us the people as out of whack (and life-of-the-author plus 75 years is SERIOUSLY out of whack), then guess what– the law, in the case of copyrights, becomes an ass, and no amount of pious gassing by the IP mavens is going to change that.
Just another of example of what Montesqieu (I think it was him….?) meant when he wrote “The useless laws weaken the necessary laws.”
Ennyhoo, that’s my two cents’ worth.
The people Gates is talking about – Larry Lessig, the EFF, and the Cluetrain crowd – would like to see patent and copyright constrained severely. As one who makes his living inventing, I’d hate to see that happen, because I know that patent and copyright are essential protections to people who create for a living. Parasitic downloaders don’t see that, of course, but we have these laws for good reasons.
Hmmm… I guess you’re not a David Byrne fan.
Then again, that was probably during your “India” phase…
The open source and creative commons people are (mostly) not anti-copyright, they instead license their works so that other people can use and build off of them.
If they have an agenda it is to lower the barriers to entry for the average person so that they can become content creators in the same way that blogs have revolutionised commentry on current events.
It’s been my experience that the CC people mostly are against the concept of copyrights and patents, and they only created CC as a means of ensuring nobody could ever copyright the things they like to download. Some CC’ers – Lessig for example – claim to approve of copyright in principle but not in fact. I don’t know whether this can be taken seriously.