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Gates: Restricting IP rights is tantamount to communism

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• Bill Gates,
• Longhorn

Michael Kanellos CNET News.com

Published: 06 Jan 2005 13:20 GMT

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Microsoft's chairman is setting the company on a course to provide software and tools that will allow different forms of entertainment to blend. Its eyes ever set on the competition, Microsoft will continue to raise the stakes against Apple in the music industry and against Google and Yahoo in search.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Research is working on ways to reduce the cost of getting people in emerging nations hooked on the Internet. One idea: mesh networks that will let several families share connections.
 
Gates spoke with ZDNet UK's sister site CNET News.com on the eve of his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to discuss competing with Google, Apple and the threats posed by anti-patent and pro-open source campaigners.

In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamouring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
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 US 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.

What do you think of Apple's success so far? I mean, they clearly have had a hit with the iPod.
Absolutely. They had a hit with the Apple II, they had a hit with the Macintosh, and they have a hit with the iPod, so this is a company that's had three hits, and that's very impressive. There are a lot of companies that don't have three hits. And in the same way that Macintosh helped get people exposed to the graphical user interface, the iPod is doing a great job getting people to think about digital music.
 
In the long run, there will be a lot of people making digital music players, and we think that there will be a very different market share with dozens and dozens of companies. And other than Apple, all those player makers are signing up to work inside the Windows PlaysForSure ecosystem.

Will there be much of a push at Microsoft to sell third-party content like music, or is it always going to be a smaller part of you?
We've said that having the music platform there is just part of the overall online relationship that we want to have with these customers.

In and of itself, it's not going to be a big source of a profit because there will be lots of people with stores out there, but then in terms of making it simple, having it work on all the devices, work with all the stores -- that is important to us. The Windows ecosystem provides variety.
 
Apple is doing things the way Apple does -- where it's the Apple hardware and the Apple store, that's great for them. We're doing it the Windows way, where you've got things like this Creative Zen Micro, which sold out this holiday season. This brings the photo capability in, and it's a very attractively priced device. So the variety story is an important one for us; it uses our rights management format and supports a subscription approach that we think can be a significant part of online music sales.

 

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