I'm a fan of clearly-delineated lines of argumentation since it's difficult to have a debate if people just talk past each other. It's much more fruitful if yo

I'm a fan of clearly-delineated lines of argumentation since it's difficult to have a debate if people just talk past each other. It's much more fruitful if you can really pinpoint exactly where it is that you disagree with the other person: if I think "B" is true and you disagree, it's much more useful for me to say, "Well, I think A->B and A, so thus B is true" and then you can say "Well I agree that A->B but think A is false" or "Well I agree A is true, but I don't agree that A->B", and then we can have a much more useful conversation instead of talking past each other. In the case of the patent issue, there are so many entangled issues that it's often difficult to find the real points of agreement and disagreement. I'd be interested to see someone actually try to make the argument that more good comes from the current system of software patents than would come from a system with no patents, since from my perspective the balance is pretty negative. On the good side you have inventions/work that wouldn't have happened without patents, the resulting utility created by them both in the form of direct usefulness to end-users and in terms of economic activity they fostered, and the knowledge sharing enabled purely by patents and all its resulting downstream effects. On the bad side, you have all the inventions and work lost due to patents: all the work not done because of fear of patent litigation, jobs lost due to companies sued of existence by patent trolls, all the resulting loss of utility to end users, and the economic cost of diverting so many resources to patent litigation. Personally, I would argue that far more is not done or is lost in the software world because of patents than is gained because of them; if you just eliminated all software patents I think you'd see a net gain in worldwide utility rather than a net loss. Copyright and trade secret protections mean that most software activity would still happen (that's what pretty much everyone uses for protection anyway: only big shops have the resources to really use their patent portfolio, and then it's often purely defensive), so the main loss would be in terms of disclosure. What you'd lose in terms of, say, not reading papers on PageRank, you'd more than gain back in terms of startups that don't get shut down and by diverting all that money spent on the legal system to better purposes.