Recent comments by Bill Gates have stirred up a small backlash amongst copyright reformists: Gates referred to those who want to loosen intellectual property law as "new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises." The comment upset chairs on the board of Creative Commons, such as famed intellectual property pundit Lawrence Lessig, who corrected Mr. Gates by saying, "We're commonists, not communists, Bill." The Commons is a market-driven project that allows anyone to register a piece of music, artwork or other intellectual property without embedding legal restrictions on its reproduction and redistribution. Creative Commons seeks to balance capitalism and free expression by enforcing an ethos based on community-mindedness.

Gates' comments are also puzzling because they suggest that the only "incentive" for art is the creation of privatized intellectual property that can be sold for as much money as possible. While artists need routes to compensation for their work, locking down on the amount of patterns and permutations that these artists can make removes incentive to create music for exclusively for markets and increases underground and illegal distribution, such as 2004's The Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse.