Wired News: We're Creative Commonists, Bill:

Big stir over Bill gates latest pronouncement on Creative Commons. Wired News reports: "The kerfuffle started when Gates was asked in a News.com interview if intellectual property laws should be reformed. He 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," he told News.com."

Wired says "the comments show just how out-of-touch Gates is with a large and growing community of people who have embraced the ideas of open source and building on one another's creative works, proponents of copyright reform say.

Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and chairman of the board of Creative Commons, mocked Gates' comments at the organization's second anniversary party Thursday night in San Francisco. He said Gates was mistaken: Copyright reform advocates are "commonists," not "communists.""

The whole debacle does show the need for more debate over the economic and social nature of the campaign against the copyright laws. Some proponents of reform claim this is a fight against restrictive monopoly practice. In Europe, the fight against copyright does tend to be seen as part of a wider social struggle. I think there are tensions within the movement and ultimately different options for how copyright - or copyleft - is handled.

I'm quite curious about what Lessig means by commonist. The term is very similar to ideas put forward in the 17th century by Gerald Winstanley - leader of the pre-communist Digger movement who called for the creation of a cooperative Commonwealth.