I believe the reference to Bill Gates has to do with his Corbis business enterprise (
www.corbis.com) which indeed is a massive library/museum of stock photography and fine art digital images for professional and consumer use (assuming you successfully register at the site). I've never tried to register and I don't know what sort of "fine art" works are included, but my impression is that it's material the copyright for which was purchased by Corbis from the artist or other entity who owned the right. Obviously, millions of digital images are being created or captured every year, and the best of them have commercial value, as Bill Gates has astutely noticed.
The site has, indeed, generated some copyright concerns and litigation, but from what I've seen the problems seem to stem from alleged use by Corbis of copyrighted material without permission or payment to the owner of the copyright. In one case, an architectural photograph contained a shot of a sculpture in front of the building, and the sculptor protested the commercial use of his artwork without permission.
It should be understood that claims to rights to digital images -- and to the legal right to make those digital images -- isn't a threat to anyone who wants to go to the Met and copy a Rembrandt. What Corbis is protecting is the product of its unique digital imaging technology. If anyone were to, say, spend a year creating hundreds of digital clip art images, we would expect that person to have the right (the copyright and other rights) to say who could use the images and how -- whether they were images of poodles or dump trucks, or of the Mona Lisa or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Doesn't mean that
I can't go to those original sources and produce my own copies (as long as the originals aren't protected by copyright).
Just to indicate how weird all this intellectual property stuff can get, I used to work for a company that published legal opinions from courts throughout the country. What could be more "public"? And yet because the company had an oft-denied but de facto monopoly in the business, our books containing those judicial opinions were the preferred citation throughout the legal system. And guess what? The company claimed (successfully) that the peculiar arrangement of the opinions in its books -- generating unique page numbers -- was copyright-protected added value or work, and that if another publisher wanted to cite to our publications, it had to pay us to use "our" page numbers. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.
Anyway, I'm not too worried about Corbis (though I'm kind of leery of some other massive online digital art collection sites). As with any other good story, it has generated a lot of "urban myth" type of spin-offs. It's admittedly difficult to sort it all out.
Steven