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Story: Gates: Restricting IP rights is tantamount to communism

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If a requisite of "skills, knowledge nad experience" were required to use a wordprocessor, I think that would pretty well qualify the program as poor in terms of usability. Can you image on the box when someone goes to purchase it..."Requirements: SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERICENCE". I bet it would be a real seller. You might want to re-think that one.

I have not conducted extensive background research on Miicrosfot buy have made my point clear: intellectual proerty rights need to be protected. If someone is perverting this conept then I certainly do not back them, Gates included.

You seem to have shifted the discussion to greed. As I have tried to point out, I am an advocate of rights, whether intellectual or otherwise. You say Gates and others throughout history have used "PR and lobbying" to further their ambitions. Whether or not this is true with regard to Gates (and it is certianly true of others in history), you might ask youself: By what means? If Gates or anyone else is holding another down, it is by means of violating that victims rights, not by productive achievement. That is the only way one can hold another down. When the role of government is to protect individual rights, the only way one can further their ambitions is by productive acheivement (which is very much related to inovation), whether or not they choose to do so "without end" (and if they did pursue it without end it would be a good thing).

In a free mrket, the only way to corner a market is by productive achievement, i.e. by offering the gretest goods at the best price. If someone has gained teh vast majority of the market share by doing this, then the public has derived an enourmous beneift, in terms of better propducts at lower prices. And if this is illegal (which it can be depending on how a beaurocrat feels like interpretting the Interstate commerce act (U.S)) then the law hurts not only consumers but producers as well.

A market can be corned by other means besides productive acheivement. It can be captured by revoking the right of others to enter. This makes competition impossible, and can only be done by an act of law.

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