Lawrence Lessig points out the pay-off to a weblog post by Microsoft's chief technology officer Ray Ozzie.
"I'm very pleased that Microsoft is supporting the Creative Commons approach," says Ozzie, discussing the ideas behind the firm's newly-developed "Simple Sharing Extensions" system.
Lessig is clearly happy that someone at Microsoft is recognising that there's some kind of value in Creative Commons - particularly given the corporation's recent history of attacks on open source followers and "Creative Commies". After all, Bill Gates a broadside at the movement when he implied that CC advocates (among others) were dangerous communists in an interview with CNet . "There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
These aren't arguments that are going to go away easily, but at least Ozzie is happy to state publicly that it's not all about infringement of intellectual property.
