No, I think Bill Gates does stuff. As Microsoft CEO he was ruthless, clearsighted and goal-oriented. He is that now too, IMO, what's changed is that his goals are now things like eradicating malaria instead of eradicating Borland.
I had in mind whoever wrote that article. Because really, what difference would releasing those patents make. The patents quite plainly aren't the bottleneck. Bill Gates is right, and whoever wrote that article is fighting for effectively nothing.
You can solve a problem. Or learn to live with it. Or find way to diminish that which makes the problem a problem.
The people who are fighting those patents are IMO doing none of that. They're fighting to transform a problem into another problem, and the new problem is as bad as the existing one. Such a pity to see.
If Gates Foundation truly cared about stopping the next pandemic, the strategy we need to embrace is to abolish copyrights and patents.
I think BG just may be blind to how much those are hurting most of the world. His entire life he's lived in an #IdeaPrivilege bubble. From Seattle to Lakeside to Harvard to Redmond. He's always had access to great information.
Most people do not have that, because of #ImaginaryProperty laws. Instead, most people are exposed to ideas in tabloids and shitty tv shows and advertisements and agenda pushing papers.
If this pandemic showed us anything, it's that we need to decentralize intelligence. We should be removing bottlenecks preventing the world's best information from reaching every child on earth. People should have had the information and skillset to be running their own protocols at home testing for COVID-19 last January. Instead everyone was handicapped and had to wait for the CDC to bumble things royally before saying "go figure it out", by which point the pandemic was no longer stoppable.
It's really as simple as that. And no matter how many tens of billions the Gates Foundation spends it can not come close to offsetting the trillions in harm from copyright and patent regimes.
It's not clear to me precisely how that change would lead to that goal. But anyway, he doesn't. It's not on his list of goals.
The goals are, in Wikipedia's words, "to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty across the globe, and to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology in the U.S."
Sorry, the video in the OP seemed to imply the pandemic preparedness was a goal. Liberating ideas would lead to that goal because we would see a rapid iteration on information, an influx of regional publishers, and the people currently choking down bad information would instantly have access to the best information (in fact, iteration would happen so quickly that the information the poor would have in a decade post liberation would be better than info the rich have today).
> "to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty across the globe, and to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology in the U.S."
No single thing could help accomplish those goals better than to eliminate Imaginary Property chains. People's brain thrive with great true information and are crippled when fed junk. The question is what is more important to Gates Foundation: accomplishing their stated goals or their own private self-interested goals?
We can't know what he means, or what is in his heart now, but his actions are definitely suspect and he appears to have a bias. I think he should have been imprisoned or fined into oblivion years ago for his anti-competitive actions and gross ethical violations.
I had in mind whoever wrote that article. Because really, what difference would releasing those patents make. The patents quite plainly aren't the bottleneck. Bill Gates is right, and whoever wrote that article is fighting for effectively nothing.
You can solve a problem. Or learn to live with it. Or find way to diminish that which makes the problem a problem.
The people who are fighting those patents are IMO doing none of that. They're fighting to transform a problem into another problem, and the new problem is as bad as the existing one. Such a pity to see.