On January 5th of this year Bill Gates, in an interview with CNET made a statement that irked quite a few people. After the interviewer asked Mr. Gates if he thought intellectual property laws should be reformed, Mr. Gates replied,

“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.”

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A recent discussion was sparked by Bill Gates’ use of the word “communist” to describe people who want to see a change in the way copyright works — namely the folks at creative commons who like to give artists the power to put their work in the public domain or allow people to use it for collaborative purposes. Gates backtracked slightly in this second interview with Gizmodo but not really.

For me the whole discussion is moot because the word communism has no meaning anymore. Does it mean state-owned? Do “the people” own all means of production? Are we not talking theory and discussing the dictatorships that have existed under the claim that they are/were communist? And even if you are talking theory is communism really an approriate description for producing something and giving it to the public (be that something art or software or whatever). We need a new economic paradigm to describe a cooperative system (community) in which people contribute labor for compensation other than money. I would like to propose Donarism as that paradigm. Read more…