Bill Gates apparently think that those who seek to reform copyright terms are communists. The silliness of that claim has spawned a number of cool T-shirts at least, including this incredibly reasonably priced one from Giant Robot Printing. Great stuff!
It would be funny if it wasn’t true. The propaganda coming from people like Eric Raymond and Cory Doctorow is all too naive and utopian.
Doctorow is a sci-fi author. His biography describes him as the son of Trotskyist teachers, although in itself that’s not evidence of anything. He doesn’t have any credibility as a legal or a technical expert, let alone a a non-politically motivated one. Raymond, as I guess you know, is even less convincing.
There are non-crazy reasons for copyright reform and patent reform, and they need to be emphasized, rather than the utopian, collectivist ones. People who have lived in communist states (like the Poles, who recently blocked a new EU software patents law) may be able to see this particularly clearly. Here’s an article (by a Russian) which discusses part of the issue, w.r.t. open source software: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_10/bezroukov/index.html
Editor’s note: Don’t be silly, it isn’t true, but neither is it funny. If you’d like to make a specific argument against something that Doctorow said or did, perhaps it would be good if you actually made such an argument, rather than just launching what amounts to an ad hominem attack, much like Bill Gates did in his statement.
Many groups, companies, and individuals are calling for copyright reform, and it is laughable (and inappropriate) to blacklist them with the label of “communist”. Perhaps I’ll expand on this theme in a future podcast.
My point was really that mud sticks. and that the perceived flakiness or leftism of some of the copyleft people would be quite enough to convince some people that they were dangerous radicals. I think that’s evident from what I wrote before. Perhaps it was an ad hominem attack on Raymond, and partly perhaps also on Doctorow. But there’s no risk of Raymond being mistaken for a communist any time soon, and what I said about Doctorow was that he wasn’t a technical or legal expert, which I’m sure he would admit.