It's fine (and a good thing) for everyone to have a deep understanding about how the rules work and to have opinions about how the rules _should_ work. This i

It's fine (and a good thing) for everyone to have a deep understanding about how the rules work and to have opinions about how the rules _should_ work. This is true whether you are talking about the current state of anti-trust laws and how they are interpreted by the courts, or the current state of patent laws and how they are interpreted by the PTO and the courts. It's complicated, though, and there are a lot of side effects when you make changes to what is in effect a very complex system. What might work well for one industry might not work well for other industries, and "I know justice and morality when I see it" works about as well as "I know obscenity when I see it". The real problem though is that most people don't have this deep understanding, and what's worse, don't realize that they are really clueless. This is especially true with software engineers, who think they can understand everything. (About the only more arrogrant people are physicists at certain national labs who are sure they can design cluster file systems, since after all, it all resolves down to F=ma, and they know physics. :-) The problem is that law and regulations make the x86 instruction architecture look regular, orthogonal, and logical. And having software engineers trying to draw legal conclusions --- applying the facts to the rules as they current stand --- is about as scary having lawyers designing a storage stack. (There are of course exceptions; I know of some lawyers who started out in computer science, and then went to law school, and there are also some computer programmers who have learned enough about law to understand how little they actually know, but at least know when to call in the specialists.) But sure, we should know lots about public policy issues, and dive down deep enough so that each of us can understand the tradeoffs --- and in general, there are always tradeoffs to pretty much any public policy preference. Trying to make assertions without paying any attention to nuance will get you something like a certain US politician currently up for re-election. (And to be fair, the reason why the law has so many exceptions and irregularities is due to trying to work around the downsides of the obvious simple rules.)