Now this is completely hive mind, unnecessary, off topic, and not really related to the OP, but:

> I frankly don’t see that much of a downside.

I think Windows taking over the world from 1995 to 2008 has absurdly destroyed lot of hacker interest in computing devices. I'm talking about those born around 93 - 96 that grew up during complete Microsoft dominance. There is no (good) terminal, until recently the development environments and toolchains were behind paywalls or not included, and terrible habits like "reformat when something breaks" emerged because of how undocumented and malignant a lot of DOS / NT's behavior acted. By raising a generation on closed platforms, they completely avoid realizing the inherent mutability of internal systems in these devices, and I think this promoted a huge amount of the computer illiteracy we see rampant today. Microsoft did give people what they wanted - brainless easy computing that takes no thought and was effectively consumable and disposable - but at the cost of a lot of engineering potential if they had distributed a tinker-able sandbox rather than a black box. Rather than be knowledgable about the workings of their devices (which are more and more taking over their lives) they are dependent on them but know nothing about them besides how to smack the keyboard or tap the facebook button.

Bill has done a lot of good in education outside this, but the undercurrents of the Microsoft takeover of consumer electronics for 2 decades will have lasting negative implications on computing for probably an entire generation. We don't know what the alternative might have been, but I know from my peers (I'm 21) there is an absurd amount of illiteracy and apathy to these devices because they were raised on Microsoft products and expect it to work or just replace it, rather than hack it to fix it. This doesn't even start on how the majority of web devs seem to be 25 - 40 explicitly because they grew up on netscape, telnet, etc and not IE. I see a firm line right around where XP came out when the entire browser space collapsed into IE where anyone currently 15 - 20 I know had a significant drop in web tech interest as a result.

> “Anybody who thinks getting rid of [patent law] would be better … I can tell you, that’s crazy,” Gates said. “My view is it’s working very well.”

Patents seem to still work (due to their short duration), so I'm not arguing patents, but copyright has destroyed a supermajority (I see estimates in the ballpark of 95%) of media and content created for the last hundred years because it all died and all copies were lost while still outside the public domain. There is a reason all modern media takes its roots from 16th - 19th century media - that is the only place you can reference without landing in a lawsuit minefield.

However, I see no reason at all why all this nonsense can't be abolished and culturally we could move towards a systemic crowdfunding approach where people propose ideas, everyone invests in the creation of their ideas, and the result is inherently public domain. The creator eats, the public benefits from any idea someone may have, and we don't end up with a huge fraction of culture and innovation lost under a rug of time.

I love Bill Gates for the good he does with his money, but I'm not going to blindly agree with him just because hes a genius or because hes rich and popular. I think Microsoft had a lot of systemic societal damage, and that IP law is completely out of control and unnecessary in this day and age.