02.06.12
Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Microsoft at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
White-collar robbery in Vietnam
Summary: The Gates Foundation goes lobbying for Microsoft again, this time in Vietnam
TECHRIGHTS has covered hundreds of examples where the Gates Foundation can be seen hacking the system and making profit while making it look like charity — a travesty to be described positively by the bribed press (that Gates is paying to do this). When the world’s biggest thief is speaking on behalf of poor people we just know something is totally wrong and journalists occasionally speak out about it (those whose publisher has not yet been bribed by Gates). The foundation is again exploiting and piggybacking farmers to spread lock-in, this time in Vietnam. Gates had already stepped into Vietnam under the "Foundation" gown in order to derail Free software adoption over there. But it’s merely a drop in the bucket. See our past posts about this country, notably:
As we explained before, software costs no money to copy, so portrayal of software as “donation” is just a trick to make Vietnamese taxpayers pay Microsoft. The Communist Party paper says this:
Bill Gates fund helps Vietnam farmers go online
[...]
The fund includes nearly $30 million of free support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and $3.64 million worth of Microsoft software. The remaining investment will be raised by the Vietnamese government.
This Windows-powered Web site fails to mention the problems with this, as mentioned at the time by Gates Keepers among several others. It’s all just a story of sentimental blackmail (an old favourite of Microsoft) and yet more Microsoft promotion. We have seen this before. Gates uses this so-called ‘charity’ quite a lot to sell or impose the sale of Microsoft lock-in, especially in places where Free software gains traction. In this case, the government (i.e. taxpayers) bear some of the costs. And then they wonder why there are problems and critics, blaming "communication" problems for the criticism. As one critic of the foundation put it, there is a brute-force charm offence going on:
Basically, I was noting that the Gates Foundation is widely viewed by many outsiders, including grant recipients, as somewhat inscrutable. It has been saying for years it wants to improve on its ability to communicate with perhaps little evidence of improvement (and even as its annual report has dramatically shrunk in size, a good thing but symbolically irresistable to me):
Remember that Bill Gates is still getting richer. The press which he bribes keep telling us that he gives his fortune away, giving people at the bottom the wrong impression and sympathy for a robber baron. By all means be sceptical of any report which sells the story of Gates taking care of the poor; he often just uses the poor for PR and for profit. One just needs to grasp the common spin techniques being crafted. Then the reality becomes very shallow. █
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02.01.12
Posted in Bill Gates, Deception at 6:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Normalising the absurd notion that the world’s richest are spokespeople for the world’s poorest
Summary: Money still the vehicle by which opinions get heard, so Bill Gates exploits this for fame, power, and profit
SEVERAL months ago we explained and showed how the Gates Foundation was hijacking the voice of the poor, rendering itself a voice of the very opposite of what it is. This is extremely dangerous for reasons we went through before and it makes up a powerful lobbying tactic which we alluded to earlier today. Over at the Indian press we see more of that same old PR which associates Gates with poor people:
A delegation of Bill Gates Foundation on Friday visited Dharavi here, among the biggest slums in Asia, to study the conditions there.
As we demonstrated in the past, Gates is artificially generating coverage to earn sympathy (he bribes publications for it), sometimes with press that is already funded by Gates for this type of agenda setting. In reality, as his wealth gains show, he does this to make himself richer and more powerful, pretending to lead the poor. Here is what one of them says:
“I am confident that we will continue to innovate on behalf of the poor,” says Bill Gates in his video on development innovation for Gates Notes. He is often criticized for his top-down approach to development and that statement does little to dissuade critics. Also note the parachuted safe landing in on the ground. All seems to indicate that innovation is coming from the outside.
Unfortunately, the video ends when it shows how innovations are being shared between countries like Japan and Brazil. The recipient, in the end, is an African country. It misses the final step that shows how future innovations will involve countries like Mozambique. The recipients will not be limited to the developing world. Accomplishing this, in part, will necessitate a re-configuration of the view that innovation goes in only one direction.
We continue to do a disservice to the poor if we insist on innovating on their behalf.
And the Bill Gates-fudned Guardian writes that owing/due to the likes of Monsanto in Africa, this is no justice:
It’s strange that at this week’s World Economic Forum the designated voice of the world’s poor has been Bill Gates, who has pledged £478m to the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, telling Davos that the world economic crisis was no excuse for cutting aid.
[...]
The biotech agriculture that Lord Sainsbury was unable to push through democratically he can now implement unilaterally, through his Gatsby Foundation. We are told that Gatsby’s biotech project aims to provide food security for the global south. But if you listen to southern groups such as the Karnataka State Farmers of India, food security is precisely the reason they campaign against GM, because biotech crops are monocrops which are more vulnerable to disease and so need lashings of petrochemical pesticides, insecticides and fungicides – none of them cheap – and whose ruinous costs will rise with the price of oil, bankrupting small family farms first. Crop diseases mutate, meanwhile, and all the chemical inputs in the world can’t stop disease wiping out whole harvests of genetically engineered single strands.
Both the Gatsby and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundations are keen to get deeper into agriculture, especially in Africa. But top-down nostrums for the rural poor don’t end well. The list of autocratic hubris in pseudo-scientific farming is long and spectacularly calamitous. It runs from Tsar Alexander I’s model village colonies in 1820s Novgorod to 1920s Hollywood film producer Hickman Price, who, as Simon Schama brilliantly describes in The American Future, “bought 54 square miles of land to show the little people how it was really done, [and] used 25 combines all painted glittery silver”. His fleet of tractors were kept working day and night, and the upshot of such sod-busting was the great plains dustbowl. But there’s no stopping a plutocratic philanthropist in a hurry.
And then there is the vexed question of whether these billions are really the billionaires’ to give away in the first place. When Microsoft was on its board, the American Electronics Association, the AeA, challenged European Union proposals for a ban on toxic components and for the use of a minimum 5% recycled plastic in the manufacture of electronic goods.
[...]
Free marketeers will spring to the defence of billionaire philanthropists with a remark like: “Oh, so you’d rather they spent all their money selfishly on golf courses and mansions, would you?” To which I reply: “Oh, you mean that trickle-down doesn’t work, after all?” But the point is that the poor are not begging us for charity, they are demanding justice. And when, on the occasion of his birthday, a sultan or emperor reprieved one thousand prisoners sentenced to death, no one ever called those pardons justice. Nor is it justice when a plutocrat decides to reprieve untold thousands from malaria. Human beings should not have to depend upon a rich man’s whim for the right to life.
They are basically deciding for the poor that they should accept something harmful (but profitable to the rich). Needless to say, the astorturfers are storming such voices that oppose the profitable agenda. It is “interesting how polarised the comments are,” notes Glyn Moody. What he might not know is the extent to which PR agents are employed to spin the Gates articles (messengers tend to be bullied, ridiculed and discouraged too). These are agencies that we’ve shown to be engaging in dubious and possibly illegal tactics. The Gates Foundation hires agents that also work for Microsoft and we know that among their arsenal there are bribes for bloggers, semi-automated blog comment mechanisms, etc.
As for the article above, maybe Gates will bribe the Guardian some more to gag such critics through the publishers/editors. As we are reminded by Felix Salmon from Reuters, the Guardian already carries paid ads for Bill Gates, pretending to be “content”:
Now what happens if your aims are a not selling baby stuff, or fizzy drinks, or financial products? In fact, what happens if your aims aren’t selling anything at all?In that case, you might not mind if someone else were doing the publishing, just as you managed to achieve your goals at the same time. Which brings me to a very interesting $2.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation, which is sponsoring the Guardian’s global development microsite for three years.
The Gates Foundation actually launched the site in 2010, spending an undisclosed sum to do so; the new grant keeps the site going for another three years. As part of the deal, every page in the site — be it blog post or news story — gets prominently branded with the Gates Foundation logo, right at the top of the column where all the editorial content goes. (In fact, the logo is significantly larger than the Guardian’s own logo at the top of the page, although the site looks and feels like the rest of the Guardian site, and lives at guardian.co.uk.)
[...]
What the Guardian doesn’t say, here, is that $2.5 million is what’s technically known as a shit-ton of money. It’s vastly more than it could ever get from ad revenues on a niche site like this — even at a $20 CPM, you’d need to serve up 125 million pageviews over three years to get that much money. Global development issues have a substantial audience, but not that substantial.
More importantly, $2.5 million is significantly more than it costs the Guardian to put together a micro-site like this — this deal is profitable, for a media organization which, like most, is in desperate need of profits. In fact, it’s a twofer for the Guardian, which manages to improve its revenues and also beef up its editorial offerings in one go.
Looked at from the point of view of the Gates Foundation, there’s real value here. For one thing, all of the content automatically gets a lot more credibility than it would if it were published by the Gates Foundation directly, especially given the suspicion with which it’s already regarded. And frankly, publishing well-written, agenda-setting material for a mass audience is not one of the Gates Foundation’s core competencies: if they tried to do it, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t do it very well. (Non-profits in general seem constitutionally incapable of getting out of their wonky high-serious comfort zone.)
And the way these deals are structured, they do a pretty good job of minimizing the sulfurous smell of advertorials and “sponsored content” which has a habit of lingering in even the glossiest sponsor-driven site. Which isn’t to say that they’re not criticized. The Seattle Times did a 2000-word investigation into the Gates Foundation’s media sponsorships earlier this year, and found it quite easy to find critics…
Yes, the Gates Foundation has effectively been running paid ads (charity-washing) in a lot of publications. More journalists need to speak out against it. The BBC is another British press body that got bribed by Bill Gates at least twice last year (tens of millions of pounds). It helps deceive the public and marginalise voices of reason. █
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01.29.12
Posted in Bill Gates, Deception at 12:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Class warfare radicalised
Summary: After papers and schools are receiving massive bribes from “king of the universe” Bill Gates (to push an agenda) dissenting voices get removed or suppressed
THE GATES Foundation is still occupying and looting the US education system, bringing to it private interests that include but are not exclusive to Microsoft Corporation. We have given many examples here before (see this index).
The US public, back when it occupied Oakland, won the support of a teacher who wrote:
That’s what Race to the Top was all about. It was a big con paid for with our tax dollars and brought to you by Bill Gates and Eli Broad.
Bill has many paid cheerleaders, hired through PR agencies (in addition to a million or more bucks a day in expenditure to control the press). We still become increasingly aware of more institutions that are funded by Gates, sometimes without disclosing it. The Center for Global Development, for instance, turns out to be paid by Gates. According to this, Morduch too is funded by Gates, but “[a]t least he comes clean about most of his work being Gates Foundation funded.”
Valerie Strauss, who previously worked under a leadership with Gates in it (until the scandal), lashes out at Bill Gates again. She writes:
Bill Gates was just in the news again, bemoaning the sorry state of America’s schools, insisting that business leaders like him have a lot to teach us about measuring performance.
[...]
Are our billionaire education reformers interested in any of this information?
We can choose tax structures that underfund our schools, we can believe that we are collectively “broke” while some people stack up the billions, and still need tax breaks. But the data is in. The gulf between rich and poor is obscene. And the schools alone will not fix this. Sending more children to college will not fix this. Only social policies that aim to reverse the concentration of wealth will make a real difference.
Bill Gates can produce the most elaborate teacher evaluation system in the world, but any system built upon the two dimensional data provided by test scores will be trumped by the smell and taste of poverty in our classrooms, and the cold hard data that shows we are failing to provide the most basic level of support for our children to live healthy lives and learn well in school.
Strauss also wrote about “[h]ow Bill Gates throws his money around in education” (her article’s headline). To quote:
What would happen if one of the wealthiest men in the world decided to remake the institution of public education in America? What if that man believed he understood the secrets to success, and sought to align the nation’s schools to his vision and methods? What if he decided to devote all his time and considerable money to this objective? Could he succeed? We are in the process of finding out just how far money and a sharply defined agenda can take you.
[...]
Influence the media: Sponsor coverage of education in the media, including major television news events such as NBC’s Education Nation. Last year’s Education Nation was tied into the release of Waiting for Superman, which had a $2 million publicity effort sponsored by the Gates Foundation.
It probably won’t be long before the publisher gets bribed and this voice of reason gets silenced. We saw that happening before. Here is part of an interesting comment we found in a blog of teachers who protest against Gates in Seattle:
Several PTA members asked questions about their connection to Stand for Children, they insisted that Stand was just one member of the coalition and did not drive policy, but also admitted that their platform had been chosen from a list of items suggested in a report created by Stand (and a consulting firm employed by Stand.) They also admitted that their funding comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but said that nobody influenced what they wrote in their grant application.
Gates’ aggressive war on teachers, going as far as retaliating (by proxy) against opposition, is shown in this article:
A veteran teacher was suspended Thursday for rejecting the evaluator chosen for him under a Gates-funded initiative that is revolutionizing the way the Hillsborough County School District assesses its teachers.
School and union officials believe this is the first such act of defiance under Empowering Effective Teachers, a complex system of mentoring and evaluation funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The district’s action comes just one day after the couple themselves, Bill and Melinda Gates, toured Jefferson High School, where the computer mogul hailed the program as a national model and called its success “phenomenal.”
[...]
The Gates system, funded in part by a $100 million grant from the foundation, replaces the old method of evaluating teachers, a somewhat informal process in which the principal or assistant principal filled out a checklist.
The same sort of thing tends to happen to journalists who report truthfully about the Gates agenda. We’ll try to highlight more such examples (we covered several before). To those who are new to all this, take the time to learn what the press is paid not to cover. No single person (perhaps except Rupert Murdoch) controls the press like Bill Gates does. █
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01.25.12
Posted in Bill Gates, Deception at 10:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Good examples of the political intervention by Bill Gates and also the purchase of a consensus in the press, by means of gentle bribes
THE world’s top lobbyist and famous criminal, Bill Gates, is still up to no good. He tries selling/promoting patents he is investing in and in the process he offers bribes to politicians who serve his agenda:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – Any Nigerian state governor whose state improves routine immunization coverage and end polio will be awarded $500,000 each by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the foundation said in a statement yesterday. .
That’s the spin; as pointed out by a critic:
Some call these cash prizes. Others call them bribes. Does the Gates Foundation really want to be seen bribing politicians?
Gates’ investments actually contribute to polio (we covered this before, e.g. here), not its avoidance. But never mind that. As pointed out in the previous post, the Wallart Foundation now takes staff from Gates’ house of lobbyists:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc named Sylvia Mathews Burwell as the president of the Walmart Foundation, its philanthropic arm, replacing Margaret McKenna, who is retiring after four years in the role.
“When Sylvia said she wanted to spend more time with family she didn’t say it was the Walton family. More concentration of power at the heart of the philanthropy-industrial complex,” remarks Gates Keepers. She didn’t say which family. Why are so many top people leaving the Gates Foundation these days? Maybe they realise that the PR generated by those lobbyists is just a smoke screen; maybe they can see clearly from the inside what the foundation really is about. It’s publicity and agenda-pushing (for profit).
AllAfrica, which was bribed by Gates, does some agenda advancement in birth control and credits Gates for it. Here is another bribed-for article:
Dr. Rilwan Mohammed, executive secretary, FCT Primary Healthcare Development Board (PHCDB), stated this when Susan Rich, Senior Programme Officer, Melissa and Bill Gates Foundation, visited the Family Health Clinic, at Area 2 recently.
There are many articles just like this, seeded and paid for by Gates (who also pays the BBC and The Guardian to do this, to name just a couple of British examples). It’s a nasty charade of self-promotion, disguised monopolisation, and ultimately profit (Gates is still getting richer). A lot of people do not know this because Gates spends about 1 million dollar per day just bribing/buying the press (according to 2011 estimates). A lot of people sincerely believe that Gates is giving his money away, not getting more powerful and wealthy (which he is). What a successful spin machine. █
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01.24.12
Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Patents at 12:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Microsoft passes angry children a bribe (under
the guide of “contract”) to lie along
Summary: New developments in the patents arena and what the news sites fail to tell
THE Microsoft lobbyists continue to attack Android and they resort to such ridiculous spin (link omitted on purpose) that the FFII is sharing it for hilarity in the mailing lists. Poor Microsoft cannot come up with a meaningful story against Android, so whenever Google is using patents to defend Android from attacks its lobbyists link to articles like this one and whine senselessly (portraying Google as a patent aggressor). Generally speaking, those types of smears against Android have been muted somewhat because journalists slowly learned who was being paid by Microsoft (Florian Müller, for example, is paid by Microsoft).
Some patent lawyers seek to make a quick buck from the mobile arena, acting as parasites in a thriving market:
Software patent attorney, Steve Aycock today announced the launch of a new law practice which helps people patent their software. The law firm specializes in helping independent inventors, entrepreneurs and start-up companies patent their new technologies including software inventions. Mr. Aycock was a software engineer for ten years before attending law school so inventors will get someone with experience in both software and patent law.
No thanks, Steve, patents are a waste of time for developers. Surely enough this bogus industry of litigation looks to expand by latching onto real industries. From the news we discover that “Venable LLP notably strengthens its patent prosecution and litigation practices with the arrival of three new partners – Michele Van Patten Frank, Toni-Junell Herbert, and Mark Shanks; Of Counsel Therese Finan; and Associate Fabian M. Koenigbauer to the firm’s Washington, DC, office.”
In other words: prepare for more lawsuits. Oh, innovation, surely!
It’s the same in Europe. Patent lawyers (who obviously want software patents in Europe) promote their cause with an analysis that ends with nonsense:
Conclusion. In case of mixed-type invention (such as organisational, commercial or intellectual applications of software), EPO examiners are urged by the problem/solution approach to consider any disclosure of non-technical aspects to the detriment of applicants. Therefore, patent drafters should not at all or only to the absolutely required extent incorporate non-trechnical aspects in the claims or specification.Otherwise non-technical aspects could “devaluate” even important technical claim features.
It is hardly even coherent. Lawyers like to make it sound complicated when in fact the criteria for rejecting a patent can be simple.
Fortunately, more people are able to see past the spin and realise that software patents — if not patents in general — have become a burden on society. Tim thinks that the Tea Party should take on the issue too. In his own words:
The debate over software patents does not unite Silicon Valley the way the debate over SOPA does. Rather, the software patent debate pits the patent bar and large software companies like Microsoft and IBM, which have tens of thousands of patents, against rank-and-file programmers and up-and-coming entrepreneurs for whom the threat of frivolous litigation is a growing disincentive to innovation.
But I think this is precisely what makes it a great issue for Republicans—and especially Tea Party Republicans—to take up. There’s a long-running battle inside the GOP between pro-business Republicans and pro-market ones. The former have supported bailouts, corporate welfare, and protectionist legislation like SOPA. The Tea Party was organized in opposition to those things. And in the last couple of years, the Tea Party has had growing momentum.
Here’s how I’d frame the software patent debate if I were advising a GOP member of Congress: Software patents are a bailout for declining software companies that are better at filing patent applications than producing innovative products and services. For example, it’s been years since Microsoft was a major source of new innovations. That torch has passed to younger companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and a revitalized Apple. But Redmond has so many patents (60,000 of them, according to one estimate) that it’s essentially impossible to write software without accidentally infringing some of them. And this means that Microsoft can force any company that beats them in the marketplace to share their profits with them, as it is currently doing to firms that produce Android phones.
If only there was as much public pressure against software patents as there was against SOPA last week… █
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01.19.12
Posted in Bill Gates, Deception at 12:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New examples from critics of the Gates Foundation where media consensus is utterly incorrect and paid for
GATES WATCHERS is a Web site that keeps an eye on the Gates Foundation.
Critics of Gates do not receive the exposure they deserve, in part due to financial strings that Gates attaches to publications (we provided evidence before). In a copy of a paid articles (thus less accessible) we find that “Tim Ogden writes the Foundation has issues with hearing the truth, accountability, and focus.” (source)
Another summary says: “It has pushed well past the boundaries of traditional foundation behaviour, intervening in and influencing public policy on both domestic and international matters – for good or ill, or very likely for a mixture of both.”
And another copy of an article alludes to Monsanto lobbying when it says:
And he says that Rockefeller no longer works in the same areas as the Gates Foundation. Huh? Don’t they both fund AGRA?
We wrote about this before, many times in fact. Gates keeps pushing his own numbers funded by himself to praise his work and push his agenda, so paper trail says a lot:
The DCP2 was published by the Disease Control Priorities Project, a joint enterprise of The World Bank, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and the Population Reference Bureau, which was funded primarily by a $3.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation.
Regarding this shameful article, Gates Watchers asks:
How many grants did it get from the Gates Foundation before it gave Melinda this award?
As points out in our IRC channels this week, Gates also bribes many departments to have these rebranded after him, creating the illusion that he is loved (reputation laundering using the money he illegally earned). The Melinda worship is equally disturbing as we already saw how The Guardian and the BBC praised her right after they had gotten bribed by her husband. We covered this at the time and put forth then evidence.
As pointed out in another posting:
Here we see a Gates Foundation-supported evaluation of a Gates Foundation-supported project with a comment by chairs of a Gates Foundation-supported evaluation group. The potential for bias is clear.
It’s all stacked.
It turns out that homeless people surround the tax-evading corporation known as Gates Foundation (based on local news), but do they know the extent to which this foundation is exploiting the public and distorting information which gets presented to the public?
About 100 homeless people and anti-poverty activists staged a “sleep-out” Monday night outside the new Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation building in Seattle to protest a funding shortage that has forced the closure of 15 shelters.
Unless there is profit and PR to be made from the homeless, Gates will do nothing. It is class warfare from Gates and fellow criminals (who use PR to hide past crimes from media attention givers who do their work properly). We will need to write about this subject in length at a later stage. But basically, Gates keeps getting richer while controlling the press to the point where it says he “gives” (free samples to create patent dependence, PR, and so forth). It’s a big scam. █
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01.10.12
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, GPL, Microsoft at 11:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Pretending to be the bazaar, too
Summary: The alter-ego of Microsoft Corporation as seen in the news and in new “official” reports
THERE is a set of companies we sort of specialise in here at Techrights because they have a commonality. While pretending to serve FOSS they usually do the opposite.
Black Duck, a firm with Microsoft roots, gradually becomes the ‘expert’ in GPL (telling us it is declining) while joined by OpenLogic, a company with management from Microsoft, which reinforces the same message. If they control information, they will control minds. In this case, they can capture and control perception that FOSS developers have. GPL FUD is just on example and OpenLogic, the firm that reinforces the same message as Black Duck, now seeks to become the authority in what FOSS to use and what not to. As one article puts it:
The report ranks hot open-source projects in three key categories: Web and application servers; application frameworks; and databases and big data.
Too bad the source of the report is a company founded and control by a former Microsoft guy, eh? They always neglect to say this. Ohloh is another one (now owned by Black Duck).
Speaking of Microsoft talking heads/points, Ed Bott is at it again with his PR lies. Pogson responds by writings:
Ed knows better. He wrote, “Windows 7 has shipped a half-billion copies” since October 2009, 9 quarters, 55 million a quarter. IDC reports 80-90 million PCs per quarter produced. M$ is no longer getting a free ride, Ed. Get used to it. There are businesses that do give M$ a free ride but there are many governments, organizations and businesses that have seen the light and choose to avoid monopoly. Shopping around is the right way to do IT.
This lie goes back to Microsoft’s PR people and is echoed by their shills/MVPs. We need to be careful in the face of Microsoft’s Big Lies that it spreads via its allies. They are all just a matter of “perception management” as Microsoft calls it. We tackled those lies before. █
“Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
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12.30.11
Posted in Asia, Deception at 12:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: In Malaysia, the ‘IP’ propaganda runs rampant — a lot more rampant than actual ‘piracy’ and a cable shows how it’s done
According to the following cable from the embassy in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), not only is Microsoft lobbying to make copyright infringement (even backup) a crime; its proxies do similar things. The following Cablegate cable reveals lobbying for patents not just from ACT but also from the Business Software Alliance (BSA).
Here is the best part: “He also pointed out that BSA supports technology neutral government procurement, given that its membership straddles both sides of the open source software debate.”
Really?
“Here is another priceless example not of pretending to be one’s own opposition but more of the usual lie that tries to tie copyright infringement with terrorism in order to pass new laws.”IBM left the BSA and just about every member is a proprietary software company. Here is another priceless example not of pretending to be one’s own opposition but more of the usual lie that tries to tie copyright infringement together with terrorism in order to pass new laws. “Gane also raised the significant funding through IPR crime of other criminal activity.”
There is another lie trying to imply that if Hollywood does not get a licence to its copyright terrorism regime, then people will die (same propaganda gets used for ACTA these days). Read this piece of propaganda: “Cyril Chua, a Singapore attorney who represents the Entertainment Software Alliance, noted the particularly high rates of piracy in Malaysia in that area of optical media (over 90 percent by some estimates). Like his industry colleagues, he pointed to the weak prosecution of cases as a prime concern, noting that the government has not strengthened prosecution to keep up with its strengthened enforcement efforts. Tom Hart of Aztra Zeneca, who represented Amcham’s pharmaceutical committee, pointed out that, while his industry faces different obstacles from optical media industry, counterfeit pharmaceuticals posed a direct threat to the health of Malaysian consumers, and thus necessitated particularly strong enforcement and prosecution.”
The short version: “pass more draconian laws for our dear Hollywood masters or your people will die.”
Now, that’s how lobbying is done. The full cable follows.
Read the rest of this entry »
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