of note on the drm front

Bill Gates: “There’s always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography...if you get notified that it's stolen materials or pornography or things like that...The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing.”

Translated: Bill Gates has a talking points team that wants him to equate potential copyright violators with pornographers so he's sure to mention it twice. The term “potentional copyright violators” while correct, isn’t as forceful as “stolen material” so he repeats that as often as possible too. His last statement makes clear that to him online publishing = print publishing. In other words, intellectual property = physical property and should be treated as such in the eyes of the law, a concept so fraught with problems I won't even go into the ridiculousness of it all.

I'm pretty sure I’ve figured out what Bill’s problem is and it’s pretty simple: Gates is convinced that Microsoft’s version of DRM is the One True Path for MS domination of internet content, and he’s saying anything he can to promote it.
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This isn't the One True Way, it Bill’s Last Chance. The last chance that MS has to try and make a ploy for control of all music, movies, photos, and text shared online from content companies by slapping some crappy rights-restricting wrapper on it all and taking a cut for MS.
A Whole Lotta Nothing: The point that I lost all respect for Bill Gates