Top 10 IT villains

2. Bill Gates
Shaun Nichols: Beastmaster Bill, the Machiavelli of Microsoft. Gates masterminded a two-decade stretch of controversial business deals which saw his small software company become one of the most profitable outfits in the world, and gave Gates a reputation as a shrewd businessman who would stop at nothing to come out on top.

From his first dealings to acquire the basis for MS-DOS, to his motivations for pushing the Windows operating system and later the company's contentious anti-trust dealings in the US and Europe, Gates has amassed a list of detractors that stretches into the tens of millions.

But that's not to say he isn't a good guy inside. Our number-two computing villain is also one of the top philanthropists on the planet today. His charitable contributions through the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are well-documented and are making huge differences in many, many lives.

Iain Thomson: Bill's charitable work is redeeming his reputation in my eyes, but his sins are many.

Leaving aside the dog that is Windows Vista, Bill's tactics have caused some serious harm to certain areas of the industry. Browser development is a case in point. Once Internet Explorer had achieved a near monopoly it stopped being something Microsoft concentrated on and languished for years. This allowed malware writers to target it with great effect.

It could be said that the Windows monoculture that Gates set up allowed wide-scale computing to take off. This is correct but, as we are increasingly discovering in agriculture, monocultures aren't particularly healthy in the long run. Once a vulnerability is found it can be exploited on a large scale, something that causes Windows users headaches and Apple users extreme smugness.

In the long term Bill Gates's effect on the planet is likely to be beneficial, but in the short term it has caused much harm, not least for Steve Ballmer's dancing skills.

1. RIAA/MPAA
Iain Thomson: Chairman Mao had a huge number of faults but his reported quote that "when the winds of change blow, some people build walls, others build windmills" is inspired.

Media organisations like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America aren't so much building walls as massive windbreaks, while sending out agents to destroy every windmill they can find in an effort to save their business model. They will fail, because those that stand in the way of technology are doomed.

Let me say right off the bat that theft is wrong. You can't walk into a store and start helping yourself to CDs and DVDs without paying by saying that you have a fast internet connection and you're entitled to get stuff for free.

But neither is it ethical to spend millions snooping on private individuals and bringing shake-down lawsuits against them for something they may not have done. The courts are now processing claims against individuals accused of downloading music illegally on the flimsiest of grounds. The media organisations take the view that if your IP address is spotted downloading materials that are under copyright you are guilty, and are using lobbying muscle to get such practices bound into law.

But with a range of IP masking tools like Tor such claims are bogus. What the media industries are trying to do is preserve their business models in the face of the internet. Other industries have bent and changed in the face of technology and prospered. The media industry seems unwilling to accept this.

Shaun Nichols: Nothing says 'villain' like suing old ladies and children. The RIAA's campaign of suing those who did nothing more than download a song on a P2P network was reckless at best and malicious and arrogant at worst.

One can see how a sense of desperation could arise in the industry. Record labels had been more or less absent for the rise of the web, and when online services began to offer music, sales of CDs plummeted. There is, however, no excuse for the way the labels reacted.

The RIAA did and still does have a right to prevent unauthorised distribution of its product, but the group quickly squandered any sympathy it may have had with a draconian legal campaign. As it is, the RIAA is now giving the tobacco and oil companies a run for their money as the most-hated industry organisation around.