Ah, ah!

Bill Gates wants a seat in your den. And he doesn't like commoners (emphasis' mine):

Q: 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? A: 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.

Bill Gates is a total (intellectual) disappointment for Larry Lessig:

If I had the time, and the money, I'd do the deep analysis that it would take to explain to myself why it is I constantly hope to be surprised by Mr. Gates. Yet I never am. Here's BoingBoing reporting the red-baiting of Mr. Gates.

It's one thing to read this sort of thing from a studio exec, or head of a record label -- surrounded as they are by the sort that surround them. But the people I've met at Microsoft are miles beyond this sort of silliness. Does Mr. Gates not even talk to them?

So, as Boing-Boing puts it, for Bill Gates: Free Culture advocates = Commies.

Enjoy some more Creative Commies propaganda, and for the irony, an entry I posted two years ago on Eldred and Commons:

When I wrote about Creative Commons I pointed to this idea that we miss the equivalent of environmentalism for encompassing the concepts of commons and public domain. For strictly etymologic concerns I had one word in mind... communism. Too bad the word has such a heavy history, we need to be more creative.