Summary: A look at how Bill Gates’ money buys him the coverage he wants and needs in order to take over US schools and other walks of life
IN THE PREVIOUS POST we explained just how the Gates Foundation was changing coverage in the press. A lot of publications are up for sale, if not literally then metaphorically. By dropping some money here and there, Gates does in fact ensure that he receives the coverage he wants. At stake we have the integrity of the press, which in turn shapes the minds of many people. It’s about perception.
According to [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], Microsoft’s NBC propaganda may no longer go under the same name (with “MS”). They might be hiding the propaganda by changing the name MSNBC.com. It’s one of those sites where Gates has been praised a lot, the source of the bias being rather obvious (it is partly owned by Microsoft).
Now, watch what else they do: “NBC, the Gates Foundation, and a bunch of other folks have put together a pretty nifty little school data project: The Education Nation Scorecard.”
This may be leading to more PR and control as this latter article says that they are working together on a “weeklong infomerical” which is further explained as follows: “An interesting coalition is forming around data-driven school reform. In the wake of the Los Angeles Times teacher quality data dump, NBC made what was essentially a weeklong infomerical for the excellent documentary Waiting for Superman, and Bill Gates announced that he was going to be dropping some more millions into education technology (for higher ed, but with more to come for K-12 later). Snazzy infographics are a nice early step.”
“Infomerical,” eh? Sounds almost like informercial.
“NBC’s Education Indoctrination” is one of Dora’s latest rants in Seattle Education 2010. She too called it propaganda and pointed a finger at Gates and Arne Duncan, whom we wrote about in last month's long post:
This is why I didn’t watch NBC’s propaganda extravaganza starring Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Michael Bloomberg, Joel Klein and a host of others brought to you by Bill Gates and Eli Broad .
In her overview of NBC’s corporate, one-sided reform-fest, “Education Indoctrination,” Leonie Haimson, founder of Class Size Matters and member of Parents Across America (PAA), wrote: “Indeed, the vast majority of panelists appear to have been pre-selected by the Gates and Broad Foundations, Education Nation’s co-sponsors, who by spending billions have been able to impose their rigid prescriptions on the nation’s urban public schools.”
These elements of SERVE would not work for our students or our community and should not be accepted by the teachers. And teachers, even though you are being bombarded by messages brought to you by Broad-backed and Gates funded faux roots organizations, such as the Alliance, Our Schools’ Coalition and Stand for Children, know that we as parents support you during these negotiations and consider you a precious resource in the development of our children.”
The Alliance for Education has been paying for these school board retreats. And where does the Alliance get its’ money from?– the Gates and the Broads.
Why, at a time when the corporate ed reformers have turned the national Klieg lights on the humblest of professional teachers and declared them failures and demanded they perform miracles, are these same enterprises (Broad, Gates, Goodloe-Johnson, Carlyle et al) out of the other side of their mouths pushing for uncredentialed, inexperienced “teachers” to take on our most challenging schools?
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I did some research and was surprised to discover that Teach for America, Incorporated is actually a multimillion-dollar enterprise. It is funded by all the usual suspects and then some: Gates, Broad, the (WalMart) Waltons, Dells, (the Gap) Fishers. Its founder sits on the board of directors of the Broad Foundation (alongside Seattle’s Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson), one of the unelected, unqualified but main drivers of education policy in America right now.
This hijack of US schools would never have been possible had the press not been up for sale and offered gross bias. “None of Gates’s competitors ever confused him with Mr Rogers,” says this highlight:
Robert Wright is no slouch and he has done his homework well for this opinion piece. One line we like is: “none of Gates’s competitors ever confused him with Mr Rogers.” This is as true for his work at the Gates Foundation as it is at Microsoft.
Bill was interviewed by Toronto’s national newsmagazine. He wants to change the world with charter schools, though of course he didn’t go to one and doesn’t send his kids to one. You see, Bill thinks it is all the unions’ and teachers’ fault.
To foster that kind of collaboration, the Gates Foundation will be establishing a “district-charter compact” program that forces both sides to publicly commit to working together to benefit students. The funding level and details of Gates’ District-Charter Compact has not been announced and will not be until the end of this year. But under the plan, charter schools would agree to do things like making sure they solve all students, such as English-language learners and special education students, and districts would help give charters access to facilities and help eliminate barriers, such as inflexible bus schedules.
Another Web site which pretends to be a news site (it called itself “Chronicle of Philanthropy”) seems to be non-stop advertising for Gates with sob stories and apologies for Gates. From the first among the comments:
Has there been any thought to renaming your publication to “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Chronicle of Philanthropy”??
It is very possible that this site too receives financial aid from Gates. It may take time to show this. Anyway, Gates’ PR team appears to have arranged for Gates to push his agenda of controlling schools through Oprah. We wrote about this some weeks ago; not only is Oprah advertising Microsoft this month (Microsoft pays for these fake endorsements) but Gates too seems to be playing a similar game, still paying for video coverage about himself using the propaganda movie “Waiting for Superman” which Huff & Puff is the latest to cover (we wrote about it before [1, 2, 3, 4]).
The propaganda was done with help from Guggenheim, who is also mentioned here upon a resignation:
The Washington Post and Huffington Post are reporting that ed reform poster girl and key figure in the pro-charter, teacher-trashing “Waiting for Superman” movie by Davis Guggenheim, will announce her resignation Wednesday morning.
The NCTQ report, bought and paid for by Bill Gates and a report done by CRPE, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a foundation funded by Bill Gates to provide all with the NCTQ Report and all things charter schools . And the Caldwell Report? I had never heard of it. I called on my best data gatherers by cell and asked them if they had come across the report and both said “No”.
I goggled it later and came up with all sorts of entries but nothing pertaining to teachers, teaching or merit pay. If someone else can find a report relevant to teaching or education referred to as the Caldwell Report, please let me know.
And where were all of the teachers in this “Education Session”? This was the PTA, the Parents and Teachers Association. Had we thrown them out with the bathwater too? There was someone in the “Education Session” who said she was a teacher. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from her about student testing and merit pay and how it was all such a great idea. She was young so I was giving her the benefit of the doubt. As it came up later during the general assembly, she was a Teach for America teacher and during her two minutes said “Rhee did some good things while she was in DC”, like fire 271 teachers and replace them with Teach for America recruits? A ringer? Possibly.
After the “Education Session” was a presentation in the ballroom to be given by the senior Bill Gates. You just can’t seem to get away from those folks these days. I decided to take a break and not hear about how we should all vote for Bill 1098 basically to pay for all of this ed reform that they are pushing. Bill Gates, Sr. wants to make sure that the Gates Foundation doesn’t have to keep forking over the dollars to maintain their idea of education.
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It was all starting to fall into place. So much for the PTA being an advocate for my child, they had become advocates for the Gates and the Broads and the hedge fund millionaires. They had sold our children out for a few shekels, high stakes testing, merit pay, union busting, and charter schools. That was all part of the package. Gates had provided the PTA with all of the “research” material that they would need to sell their ideas. The deed was done and the troops, or rather the Stepford Wives, would be marching forward into the offices of the state legislators and other policy makers waving their notebooks filled with data.
Again, it is about the propaganda film from Guggenheim, who is pushing Gates’ agenda despite warnings from the likes of Ravitch. Education Week, which is also funded (i.e. subverted) by Gates, has been bold enough to make the exception. “This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch on her Bridging Differences blog,” says this new article, “which she co-authors with Deborah Meier on the Education Week website.”
These electoral losses and the recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll suggest that the “reform” movement led by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, DFER, hedge-fund managers, and the Obama administration lacks a base of popular support. But now begins the next phase of the movement, as its public relations campaign goes into high gear with the release this week of “Waiting for Superman.”
“Billionaires Unite! Against Public Education and Teachers” is this latest headline which protests Oprah’s propaganda for Gates and goes further by quoting Ravitch [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]:
Winfrey has used her show — twice in one week — as a platform against public education. She first hosted billionaire Bill Gates to discuss his “philanthropy” in education, as he promoted the new anti-public education propaganda film Waiting for Superman.
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For example, the Facebook founder’s donation of $100 million to the Newark, New Jersey school district will almost certainly require — according to The New York Times — that the school institute these reforms, much like Bill Gates’ donation of $100 million to the Tampa Hillsborough County School District — and the $90 million to the Memphis school district — had the same types of strings attached.
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Ravitch summarized the chapter:
“The Billionaires Boys Club is a discussion of how we’re in a new era of the [billionaire] foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations — the Walton Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations — Gates, Broad and Walton — are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the U.S. Department of Education. We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding.”
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For example, the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randy Weingarten, sent a friendly invitation to Bill Gates to address the AFT convention, where Gates was allowed to deceive the teachers about the intentions of his multi-billion dollar “investment” in “reforming” education.
Gates’ ideas about education — blaming teachers for everything — ignores what most teachers already know: the main predictor for a student’s success is social-economic background. Rich students outperform poor students for many different reasons: less stress, more resources, parental help, etc. Ignoring this obvious fact exposes the billionaires’ profit motive behind their fake charity.
Pittsburgh teachers want more say in how they teach, more time in the classroom and better mentoring, according to a survey released Tuesday and commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
A remarkable series of graphs, commissioned by the Gates Foundation.
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Produced by The Guardian and the Gates Foundation, the charts are draw from the Millennium Development Report Card. Basically, it shows how well countries are performing on key development metrics, relative to their GDP.
For those who do not remember, The Guardian is funded by Gates [1, 2, 3, 4] and this time too it shows.
Over the past few weeks we have noticed a lot of “education” type PR from Gates. It is being pushed by PR agencies into all sorts of sites, drowning out signal [1, 2, 3]. Even AP appears to be favouring such PR now. Where is all the mainstream coverage about the dangers of it? Blogs certainly cover this a lot, but there is a certain cowardice that’s prevalent in Gates-funded media companies.
Then there is the subject of libraries, which we previously covered in posts such as:
Gates is still spreading Microsoft to young people through computers in libraries [1, 2] (obviously with Windows) and sometimes with software ‘donations’ (Microsoft too gets involved) or connection [1, 2, 3]. How about something without strings and without PR attached to it? Real givers do more than just a lot of publicity. █
“In the future, Microsoft wants Windows to run everything, from PCs to phones to cars to appliances. This is a terrifying prospect. If it happens, I’d be far more afraid that machinery everywhere would grind to a halt, planes would fall out of the sky, and civilization would crumble as a result of crummy embedded Windows design than any Y2K problem.”
–Paul Somerson, PC Computing
Summary: Bill Gates is not only buying the news but he also changes old (archived) news by putting money on the tables of publishers so that slowly but surely bits of the past will be evaporating (self censorship)
THE CORRUPT activities of Microsoft can gradually be removed from the face of history if Gates gets his way. In today’s post we present new clippings and references that help show how Gates is buying — not earning — influence from the mainstream press.
The Gates Foundation has, for quite a long time in fact, been promoting itself through the Seattle press. In some cases it even paid parts of the Seattle press directly and we gave examples. We have complained about the Seattle Times on numerous occasions and so did other people including former Microsoft staff. Their bias is very easy to see. Here for example is Kristi Heim and more of her Gates advertising [1, 2] (PR and sob stories, which often seem like they just get pre-processed/passed by PR agents for this site to publish). Brier Dudley, who recently admitted having meals with Microsoft, is currently promoting their products in the Seattle Times. There’s no need to insult any writers here; it’s about explaining how today’s journalism works and why it cannot be considered “objective”. It’s a complicated game of influence and affinity. This has an impact on coverage which we’ll first illustrate with the following new example.
Billionaire Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen opposes Initiative 1098, which would establish an income tax for wealthier Washingtonians.
Traul Allen’s attempt to escape tax also gets covered by Microsoft boosters [1, 2], who do almost nothing to criticise him for it. They are either biased or spineless; then again, they too are Seattle bloggers. Their business depends on Microsoft because the writing they do is about Microsoft.
Traul Allen is a malicious person for reasons we covered before. One of his latest acts of malice is patent trolling (thus the name “Traul”). Patrick Anderson writes: “So, have #Webvention and Sharing Sound made everyone forget all about Paul Allen / Interval Licensing? #patent #swpat Just wondering…”
“Their business depends on Microsoft because the writing they do is about Microsoft.”There is some more coverage of interest about the tax question in Washington, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. For those who do not know, Gates and his father are exempted from tax (they found and exploited a loophole which they now protect), so they have an opposite position. They want rich people to be taxed more because it does not affect them [1, 2, 3]. For more information about Microsoft and tax, see this page. It is clear that another battlefield is being played by Microsoft in the sense that it passes taxation to the poor by actively lobbying on the matter [1, 2]. Where is the press criticising them? In the case of Gates, the press neglects to even speak about his tax exemptions. How come?
Gates and Press Ownership
A few weeks ago we wrote about Bill Gates buying coverage of his work, this time from ABC. Based on some more coverage we found, e.g. [1, 2, 3], up to $6,000,000 will be spent on one-year coverage. How many journalists can one employ for one year at this budget, solely to ‘cover’ (glorify) Gates’ own work at his own expense in ABC? This guy is greasing himself up by merely buying reporters. How long will the public be fooled and fail to see how the media really works? “The Gates Foundation reveals a big bribe to a major TV network” says the headline from Gates Keepers and based on this article, Monsanto will benefit too:
Media, Money, Monsanto, and Melinda
The Gates Foundation wants you to know more about global health. So, they are kicking $1.5 million to ABC for a year long series on the subject (ABC is tossing in $4.5 million of their own as well).
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
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However, it is problematic to have media coverage paid for by an individual. I personally believe that press should be as free as possible. There is a need for funding, of course, but there becomes a conflict of interest when money comes in from a source who wants their story to be told. Can ABC really dig into the way that the Gates Foundation works and offer up real pieces that examine what is done? I would argue no. It is mostly because Gates want the series to focus on the fact that there are growing global health issues which people need to care about. To me, it seems to be nothing more than an advocacy campaign at the core of series.
However, it is natural for the Gates Foundation to want what they are doing in global health to be featured and for it to be seen in a positive light. If they are shown as anything less than great the investment is a waste. Questioning the Gates Foundation could lead people to support other initiatives. They do not want that (who would?).
Here is another new article on the subject. This one is titled “Chemical Relations: Monsanto and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” (it gets harder for Gates to deny his relations with Monsanto).
Indigenous, farmers, environmental activists and lots of other people are pissed off about the widening connection between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and agribusiness titan Monsanto.
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There really isn’t anything new or secretive about this. In 2006 the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which is based in Nairobi, Keny
“While Bill Gates Wants Africa to Embrace Industrial GM Food, Italy Fines Franken-Maize Growing Farmer” says the headline from treehugger.com:
Vidal gives a blow-by-blow account of the Gates Foundation’s $23 million investment in Monsanto, a market increase over the past six months and its $10 million teaming with Cargill to promote massive industrial-scale cultivation of GM soya in Mozambique.
For some reason there are rumours that Gates owns 90% of Monsanto. Surely that can’t be true, but the rumour deserves at least a mention. It is indicative of the growing perception that Gates is the muscle being the abusive Monsanto-like monopolies. Sadly, the article about it is linking to a bad piece funded by Gates himself to underplay the issue. For some more background on the subject see:
A few weeks ago we wrote about Coca-Cola promotion from Melinda Gates, who is a major Coca-Cola investor [1, 2, 3]. “Gates Foundation and Coca-Cola Join Forces to DO GOOD” says this ridiculous headline. It lacks information about corporate crimes and other background and omits the existing connection with Microsoft too. Just a few weeks ago we learned that “Coca-Cola CIO joins Microsoft”. The body of the article states: “Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) CIO Donna Wright is to join Microsoft New Zealand as services director.
“Her core responsibility will be to oversee all activities relating to the services business, including consulting and premier support groups.”
Linda bought a TED and then blathered so much about Coca Cola that Gates Keepers think she must have had a marketing job done on her. The Gates Foundation does partner with Coca Cola. Remember the Atlanta Coca Cola Olympics?
Some TED events are TED also funded by Microsoft. Well, people in the West hardly know about crimes of Cola-Cola and had Gates cared about human rights, it would help expose or reform Cola-Cola, not invest in it and then boost it (which helps the stock held by Gates).
Going back to the issue of press coverage, Gates is arrogantly paying for coverage about himself rather than just let people do their work (reporting) as they see fit. It’s a bit like journalistic “fraud”, which turns newspapers into something else, more like in Stalin era. Watch what a former Microsoft employee alleges:
Crosscut Strips Anti-Microsoft Paragraph from Published Editorial on Tax Policy
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However, by the time I read the editorial, the quote was gone. This concerned me as I’ve had trouble getting Seattle’s journalism community to cover Microsoft’s thirteen year billion dollar Nevada tax dodge. It may concern you too because Crosscut has relied heavily on $500,000 in grants from the Gates Foundation over the past year. Is there a conflict of interest at play? Additionally, the author of the editorial, Ed Lazowska, holds the Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.
“Seattle Weekly Questions Gates Foundation’s Journalism Gifts” says this followup. It starts to make more sense now:
Interestingly, we are not the only one asking whether gifts by the Gates Foundation affect coverage of its activities, Bill Gates and Microsoft. After we reported concerns about Crosscut’s post-publication deletion of a critical paragraph on Microsoft’s Nevada tax dodge (carried in the Seattle Post Globe today as well), the Weekly asks whether the Gates Foundation’s gifts to ABC News will affect how it’s portrayed.
What we see here is how Gates keeps corrupting the press:
Interestingly, I just returned from the World Editors Forum in Hamburg where a journalism colleague who works frequently in Africa says the Gates Foundation is making similar investments there.
Yes, in Africa too Gates has been funding journalists, i.e. paying to ‘train’ them to write favourably about his own work. We wrote about this at the time it was happening. What travesty.
Now we come to CBS. Well, a few weeks ago CBS broadcasted this propaganda program titled “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away A Fortune”. The title does not provide a reflection of reality a they only increase their wealth for the time being, despite claiming to be given it away rather than paying any tax. It’s the same propaganda as was published by CBS that we also find in the news sites, the Seattle blogs, and Causecast from Huff & Puff (possibly paid by Gates as well [1, 2, 3, 4]). Here is the original and here is criticism of this propaganda:
Bill and Melinda Gates were interviewed on CBS News’ 60 Minutes Sunday evening about the Gates Foundation’s goals in global health, poverty reduction and U.S. education. The interviewer claims the Gateses have shunned publicity and that many viewers might not even recognize Melinda Gates. Huh? Oh, and the clip begins with a Viagra ad.
Tom Paulson has a good sense of humour. Here he mocks the claim that the Gates are shy of publicity. The Gates and the Gates Foundation have been hungry for (positive) publicity for the past several years and have paid a lot of money to some of the cleverest publicists in the field in order to be sure that they get it. For voices in civil society to develop a critical analysis of the activities of the Foundation requires a lot of swimming against this tide.
That’s funny, just after I noted there was this web site where people could ask Bill and Melinda Gates questions, the ONE campaign turned it off.
Maybe it was just a coincidence. Or maybe it was because I noted that there’s been some controversy regarding ONE’s spending practices.
It’s not just US-based and Africa-based press which gets corrupted like this. The problem is global and after Gates’ campaign bought itself a TED for more propaganda (which got criticised here) we learned that The Guardian, which Gates recently paid to praise him [1, 2, 3, 4], is hard at work doing what it was hired to do. “Sarah Bosely, subcontinental mothers in law, and the Gates Foundation” is one new example of The Guardian advertising Gates.
It is disappointing to see an experienced, talented, and usually respected health journalist write a fluff piece on the optimism of Bill and Melinda. If the Gates Foundation had not bribed the Guardian with a big grant to create a ‘development’ website, the Gates Keepers think that Sarah Bosely would not have written this article. Sad.
More on funding of Sarah Boseley by the Gates Foundation
Ooops. Sarah forgot to mention the Gates Foundation in her article on HIV funding that the Lancet study was funded by the Gates Foundation. And her writing is sponsored by the Gates Foundation. And HIV funding is funded by the Gates Foundation. Does anyone hear an echo in here? Does anyone find this even mildly disturbing?
This is just disgraceful and it looks bad for a good publication such as The Guardian. They sold out and it is humiliating to the business of news reporting. It leads to distrust. Gates’ money voids trust.
The Independent has this open letter to Bill Gates. It does not appear to have been paid by Gates to praise him. Not yet anyway. Let’s hope it stays true to its name and stays independent.
So, to finish up, it is important to realise that the media’s coverage of vaccines is a reflection of the diverse views among the public at large. It would be wrong to assume that we have the power to dictate public opinion. We all find bad news often more interesting and important than good news, we don’t want constant reports of an ongoing process that doesn’t change very much, and we need milestones around which to crystallise a story. That’s why reporting on the obvious benefits of mass vaccination in the developing world is so difficult.
The next post will deal with an example or two from NBC and other channels. It will also show what Gates does to education. █
Footage from the Gates deposition (quotes for humour’s purpose only)
Summary: The co-founder of Microsoft is quickly establishing a place for himself as a patron of the United States (and beyond), who is never elected by the population and may stay in power for decades to come
THE Gates Foundation has grown rather influential thanks in part to a huge PR campaign (probably multi-billion-dollar) which has gone on for years. As we’ll show in later posts, the Gates Foundation is buying publications or journalists so that they publish glamourising pieces about the Gates Foundation. It’s an abuse of power and the media along with its audience will suffer as a result.
President Barack Obama holds the first White House summit highlighting the role that community colleges play in educating workers, an effort boosted by a $35 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“Why would a politician wish to associate herself with such an offensive company?”Is Gates powering/bending governmental decisions like he is a cross-border president now? Nobody elected him. He is just buying his way into politics and he never needs to go through the same process. We warned about Microsoft influence in government many times before and we see it again now that White House Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes to Microsoft. Why would a politician wish to associate herself with such an offensive company? To quote the Microsoft-friendlyTechFlash: “Hang around Microsoft’s Redmond campus long enough and you never know who might show up. Today’s visitor will be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is set to tour the futuristic Microsoft Home — a series of rooms inside Microsoft’s conference center — and answer questions from reporters this afternoon.”
To keep up with demand, K&L Gates has launched a U.S. foreclosure task force designed to aid clients in addressing questions related to potential lawsuits, hearings and foreclosure moratoriums.
Laurence Platt, a mortgage banking partner in the firm’s Washington office and a leader of K&L Gates’ financial services practice, wouldn’t comment on specific clients the firm is representing, but he said they include national banks, loan servicers, and other public companies. K&L Gates also recently served as examiner in the New Century and WorldCom bankruptcy proceedings.
The Gates club is still having private meetings and trips to China. We have covered this before. It’s a bunch of publicity/rave trips to China [1, 2] and few people do manage to see through the PR. Buffett is a major part of this PR. He too is trying to launder his reputation.
A lot of what’s promoted by Gates is generally tied to patents and to banking*, as we repeatedly explained in the past. Bill’s friend Nathan Myhrvold (from Intellectual Ventures) is also making money from it, or at least trying to. From The New York Times:
In 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates — whose foundation now sets the agenda in global health — announced that they intended to end malaria, an ambition that both the interagency Roll Back Malaria Partnership and the World Health Organization affirmed. Funds for the job have zoomed from $100 million a year in 1998 to nearly $2 billion by the end of 2009.
The Gates Foundation has given vaccine researchers $150 million since the late 1990s. There are dozens of experimental malaria vaccines in labs across the globe, with the most clinically advanced, Mosquirix, appearing to reduce the incidence of illness from malaria by 65 percent.
Oil companies such as ExxonMobil, plagued by malaria in West Africa, have bankrolled genomics research at Western universities in search of new drugs. Even venture capitalists such as the former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold have joined in. He showed his laser mosquito-zapping system at a highly publicized lecture in February.
All hope to find a simple, permanent cure.
The new findings, however, challenge this dream. That is because eradicating a disease is, in several important respects, a goal diametrically opposed to controlling one.
Intellectual Ventures too has a PR machine going and to cite an old example:
I enjoyed Levitt & Dubner’s “Freakonomics”, and picked up the followup “Superfreakonomis” recently at an airport. The last chapter, however, was astonishing. The entire chapter was devoted to a glowing advertisement for Intellectual Ventures, pointing out that they own 20,000 patents “more than all but a few dozen companies in the world”, but of course “there is little hard evidence” that they are patent trolls.
But this bunch of wacky genius billionaires have solved global warming (much of which they dispute anyway) and can control malaria and prevent hurricanes from forming. Unlike the rest of the book which covers analysis of well-known facts and disputes them with insightful economic research, this chapter is so breathless and gushy that it makes me question the rest of the author’s work.
I first came across Intellectual Ventures when The Economist reversed their 100-year opposition to patents, and the only reason I could find was a similarly cheerleading piece about this company. (I had naively expected new research revealing some net positive of patents, or some such revelation).
Intellectual Ventures is lobbying and bullying, it is not doing research and producing any products. It’s just PR which ever suggests otherwise. We’ll say a lot more about PR tomorrow when many more examples from the news will be given, including those which relate to education. █
_____ * The micro-payment gig of Gates [1, 2] and the Grameen Foundation [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] comes to Cambodia now.
“FOSS” agenda hijacked by fakers who are on Microsoft’s payroll
Summary: A few more old mobbyists are back to trashing Red Hat and Free software in general; Microsoft is unable to take the voice of Free software or to attract Free software developers to Microsoft-controlled substitutes
HAD Free software not been an increasingly big threat to proprietary software, then it would just be left alone. Some of the worst attacks on software freedom appear to come in the form of software patents, which are a rather effective weapon because they compete with software based on litigious grounds as opposed to technical grounds. It’s no coincidence that many of the mobbyists (including Microsoft Florian) specifically hammer on this one aspect or this one vector of attack on FOSS. The patent lawyers already use those mobbyists to justify what they do, as evidenced by this new pro-software patents piece from lawyers that use Microsoft Florian to promote their point of view:
Anti-software patent campaigner changes his mind
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It seems to me, though, that while Mueller’s welcome stance is bang on the money, he still has a little further to go until his journey reaches its logical end. Because surely if software patents are “a fact of life”, doesn’t it also make sense for there to be absolute clarity about what they cover and the limits of patentability? Surely the answer to that question has to be yes. And if that is the case, shouldn’t Mueller – the good European that he is – now come out in support of European legislation that does just that? I know, we could call it the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive, or maybe the Software Directive for short.
Microsoft Florian says: “I didn’t change my mind on sw patents, just the angle: back then legislation, now enforcement/competition.”
Based on his words and his actions, he is in favour of software patents now, but he is still trying to keep the mask on. This is a guy whose career is campaigning for companies that pay him to do this. Microsoft Florian has the same positions as the BSA and he is just like ACT, whose Microsoft-funded staff is faking SMB voices (complete reversal). They both promote and lie about RAND. Watch out as Microsoft Florian still introduces and advertises himself, e.g. when he mass-mails journalists or puts up public profiles, as an opponent of software patents (citing something from many years ago) and a friend of Free software, even though nearly nothing which he does signifies this; quite the contrary in fact.
The number of mobbyists we find out there appears to be growing now that Jeff Gould is back with his attacks on Red Hat’s business (Microsoft Florian also slams Red Hat’s business) and Dennis Byron is back too, having done a lot of the same a few years ago. This time too he attacks Red Hat’s business (see the comments from unimpressed readers). We gave more example of such FUD attacks a few days ago and earlier today the following observations were made in IRC:
oiaohm
gnufreex: so you are not noticing the increased attempts to trash linux.
As Microsoft’s AZune [sic] plans go awry with the departure of Ray Ozzie [1, 2], they now try to embrace the open source Fog Computing competition. “At OSCON,” claims Simon Phipps, “I told Microsoft’s cloud guy that supporting OpenStack was a no-brainer. They’ve done it, at least a bit…”
Microsoft has turned over the leadership of its IronPython and IronRuby dynamic language projects to the open source community. Jim Hugunin, who led IronPython, leaves for Google.
Regarding Microsoft influence, Google gets filled with some, which leads to issues we demonstrated before (DirectX and ActiveX usage for example, even inside Google). It has been funny to watch mobbyists dismissing their critics as “Google shills” or something along those lines. It’s a case of reflection of self justification. Watch out and be careful of mobbyists; report them if we’ve missed any (other than stalkers whose accounts are solely dedicated to smearing Techrights because we just ignore these psychopaths). █
Posted in Site News at 10:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Techrights audiocast may be coming soon
OWING TO growth of this Web site we have begun looking into the possibility of making an audiocast (Ogg, MP3, and maybe YouTube) to complement both OpenBytes and Techrights. Stay tuned for details.
My appearance on TWiT TV (video below) was poor and we can do a lot better than that if the panel and the topic are set differently. Thoughts on the subject are welcome as a regular show will require an investment of time. If there is no interest in it, then maybe another idea can be considered to take this site into the next level. █
Summary: An overview of news about SCO (copyright challenge) and software patents, which are increasingly being used to threaten the legality of Free/libre software
[T]he judge’s instructions to the jury later that same day, the last day of the trial.
We also learn more on why Novell’s slander of title counterclaim was tossed, basically on a legal technicality, because of a lack of specific evidence of special damages Novell suffered, but note the plain-spoken judge on the matter and on Darl McBride’s behavior:
THE COURT: Mr. Jacobs, again, the proposed instruction in this case — and we have spent the better part of the last hour plus looking for any kind of case law to help us — would indicate the types of damages contemplated by a scienter title case are narrow and focus almost exclusively on the types of things that are described in the jury instruction. And absent anybody finding anything to the contrary, the Court feels that it is going to have to grant the Rule 50 motion because of the absence of the types of damages that are required.
I would note on the question of constitutional malice, our analysis of the evidence would be that the Court could not grant it on that basis because we believe there is evidence that indicated that Mr. McBride was aware of the fact that his company may not own the copyrights, he persisted in making public statements, and a jury — a reasonable jury could conclude that there was constitutional malice.
But in the absence of any finding of damages, the Court is going to grant the motion and we’ll just have to do the work overnight that we must in order to exclude the counterclaim, any reference to the counterclaim during the course of — and what will result is tomorrow morning I will give you another packet. I’ll have to ask if you could use your fellow attorneys here to go through that to make certain we’ve done it properly.
So, he reluctantly felt bound by law, not finding the highly refined type of damages slander of title cases require, while at the same time noting that had they been presented he believed a jury could find constitutional malice on SCO’s part, because McBride knew there was dispute over the ownership of the copyrights but he persisted with his public statements otherwise. Interestingly, SCO initially had the same damages issue with its slander of title complaint, lo these many years ago, but it was allowed to revise the complaint to replead better. Novell much later in the process was not, probably because it was now an issue of evidence.
We have found no mainstream news about the SCO case. It sometimes seems like Groklaw regulars and Pamela Jones are the only ones (except the trial’s lawyers plus jury) who keep track of this lost case. Techrights never had much SCO case expertise, but our area of focus is software patents and with informants from the FFII we shall continue to share some analysis, mostly an assortment of existing analyses. It goes without saying that we do not always agree with opinions that we quote or cite here. We try to be comprehensive by presenting all sides and forming an opinion about each. One point made by the FFII’s president last night, for example, is that news about Google’s tax avoidance* is in some way related to its policy on software patents. A reference to the news was put here earlier on in our list of links, but the suggestion that “Google is using its software patents to evade US taxes” is one we could not substantiate. I asked the FFII’s president: “Patents?”
“Yes,” he said, “intellectual property”. It would be nice to see the correlation, if any, between software/business method patents and shifting of tax processing to other countries. Some banking tricks are actually patented (c/f In Re Bilski). The FSFE, which is based near the FFII, recently exposed the latest hostile behaviour of the BSA [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], which TechDirt now accuses of sending “Ridiculously Bogus Letter To European Commission” (it’s the same BSA which lies about software patents).
Is it just me, or is the BSA becoming a bigger and bigger joke each time it does just about anything these days? For years, the organization has put out its yearly bogus stats on “piracy,” which have been debunked over and over and over again. They’re about the only trade group that still has the gall to equate a single unauthorized copy to a single lost sale (even the RIAA and MPAA have moved away from that claim). They’ve also been known to simply make up survey numbers, rather than actually ask people in certain countries. And then, even on news stories, they seem to make it clear that they have no clue what’s going on — such as last week’s announcement that ACTA was a treaty already signed by 37 countries, when it’s neither a treaty, nor has it been signed by anyone.
The BSA is not any better than the Murdoch-funded Chamber of Commerce. On behalf of big business it attacks the rights of citizens.
Jamie Love has just explained what the EU must do about ACTA in order to eliminate or mitigate the patent-related ramifications:
Jamie Love has been one of the key people writing about and fighting the worst aspects of ACTA. He’s just posed a good question on Twitter:
Why haven’t the EU civil society groups done more on patents in ACTA? It is quite possible to get patents out at this point.
While many people (especially politicians and the press) like to equate patents and innovation (often falsely suggesting that fewer patents means less innovation), studies have shown that patents are actually a really bad proxy for innovation, in that there’s simply no direct link between the two. And that’s a problem, considering that the patent system is supposed to be about creating more incentives for innovation. In fact, however, it often appears that the patent system is actually creating incentives to get more patents.
[...]
Incentives are funny things. If you actually believe that patents are correlated to innovation, then such strategies make sense. But if the reality is that patents are simply correlated to patents, then it’s a huge dead weight loss to focus so much on patenting, rather than actual innovation.
free software license: any license that gives the user of the software all 4 freedoms.
strong license: a free software license designed to keep those 4 freedoms, even for users down the line, through copyleft- a requirement that users also grant the same freedoms for derivative works.
permissive license: a free software license that doesn’t worry about how strong it is, just that it gives the 4 freedoms.
the problem with permissive licenses is not always an issue- lots of projects will not be high profile enough (or even useful or innovative enough) to end up in the crosshairs of the competition- however, what constitutes “high-profile” varies- you may have never heard of tomtom, but it became a victim of software patent abuse by larger software companies (tomtom is a dutch company that makes gps devices.)
Here is another new post about wireless routers with embedded Linux. Red Hat’s Haish Pillay calls it “more evidence on the failure of software patents” and it goes like this: [via Slashdot]
Optimum Path is now suing basically everybody making an embedded Linux based wireless router for infringing on patent #7035281, filed September 13, 2000. This patent covers many features of the WRT-54G series (first shipped in Dec, 2002), and related products, from multiple other manufacturers, features that were built into the Linux mainline code, long before the patent was filed. Optimum Path now also holds a second patent – filed in 2005 – granted in July 2010 – which covers not only the ground covered by the first patent but includes content filtering (!?). I’m told this latter patent is not currently the subject of litigation, but it bothers me as much as the first – we were doing content filtering in Linux in 1999, also… Everybody was doing it.
In looking back on the heady years of 1998-2002, I’m now nearly certain that back in July of 1998, we actually created the first recognizable “embedded Linux wireless router”. PLEASE: Note the word choice, there – embedded, Linux, wireless, router. Eliminate any of those words and you end up with a different product, from a different person.
Here we have another illustration of software patents as the top threat to Linux. SCO ceased to be a problem several years ago. Thanks to the trial we now know that Linux has no copyright issues, but software patents are a different story because infringements need not be willful. Software developers defend copyrights, not patents. █
_____ * Legalised but by no means ethical or acceptable — a point that’s made clear in films like “Oh Canada” and a point we covered in reference to Microsoft, which also uses tax havens in Europe.
