Obviously it's the Mythbusters! Not only are they scientists AND engineers, but they're entertaining and appeal to a wide audience. What third grader doesn't like robots and explosions??

No one else mentioned even comes close. Sagan? Bill Nye? Some random astronomer? Please. They have absolutely zero crossover appeal with the general population (much less third graders) and will result in blank stares. May as well use Henry Kissinger (yeah not a science guy, but just about as boring as you can get).

Preferred embodiment and disclosure are separate requirements. The patent must disclose enough for one skilled in the art to make it without undue experimentation. So you don't need to spell out every detail, just enough that a skilled practitioner can recreate it without wasting a ton of time figuring out how it works. Source code level is way overkill for this. E.g. I can just say "sort the list of names" and any decent programmer knows how to implement a quicksort on a list of strings.

Preferred embodiment is much weaker. It just requires that if you know of multiple ways to do something and one is clearly preferable, you must disclose that. E.g. if heapsort performs much better in your invention than quicksort, you must disclose that. But you only have to disclose the difference if you know about it when submitting the application. Again, source code level is generally overkill.

I agree most software patents are too vague. But there's a lot of room between hand-wavy vagueness and every-last-detail-in-source code for a reasonably accurate description.

Protection is only given to what the claims describe, not the specification. And claims are required by statute to be a single sentence written in English. They should be a lot tighter than they are now, but the opposite extreme of source-code level descriptions is unnecessarily restrictive.

There's room to work this stuff out. And now we're talking how software patents should look rather than should they exist.

I agree with just about everything you said. The patent system would be a lot better with those types of reforms. But nothing about those problems is unique to software. You're just more aware of it.

IOW software patents aren't the problem. Bad patents are the problem.

There are no legit software patents,

That's easy to say in the abstract. What about Google's PageRank patent? Search was a hard problem for many years. Altavista, etc were mediocre. Google came up with a new approach that was leaps and bounds better. In other words the very definition of a useful new invention. So you are left with two possible arguments why it should not be patentable. Either (1) Google's innovation was obvious such that anyone in the field would have known about it or (2) software inventions as a whole are undeserving of patents.

(1) - If you say it was obvious, then that means some other software creations are not obvious. Whatever those non-obvious software things are would pass test (1). To deny those things a patent you must invoke (2).

(2) - Why doesn't any software deserve a patent? Is creating a great, new, non-obvious piece of software somehow less work than a mechanical invention? Doesn't it require just as much genius, study, insight, and effort to produce a new search system as a new fishing hook or screw design? Software has the potential to be vastly more complicated than any other type of machine. An airplane has tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of moving parts which must be synchronized. Large program can easily have millions of lines of code performing tens of millions of operations that potentially interact. To say that software is per se not worthy of patenting draws artificial and illogical distinctions between the tasks involved in software and mechanical arts.

Software is NOT purely mathematics, any more than a nuclear bomb is purely quantum mechanics. Functional software has to account for a plethora of real world conditions. How much processing power is available? Storage space? How quickly do we need a result? Are quick partial results better then slow complete results? Does our input data change, and if so how frequently? How do users interact with the system? These and numerous other considerations have to be considered even at the algorithmic level. Just because it all runs in binary boolean logic somewhere doesn't make it all mathematics. The system encodes many other considerations that don't show up at that level. For the same reasons, software can't be dismissed as purely "abstract ideas" or "mental steps". Theoretically you can simulate a game of Doom with bit logic in your head. However the results aren't remotely comparable to playing the game in real-time on a computer.

Now we can quibble over exactly where to draw the lines to get a software patent: how inventive it must be, how narrow the claim coverage is, how much protection it should afford, what the public domain already contains. Those are all legitimate questions. But to dismiss all software out of hand as being inherently unpatentable is nothing but illogical prejudice.

and quite a bit of planet sees it that way.

Can't argue with that. Whether that's desirable is left as an exercise for the reader.

The deeper analysis is: the court decided nothing. They gave no new tests or insights to determine what is and isn't patentable. They simply said the old machine-or-transformation test is pretty good but not exclusive, and that abstract ideas are still not patentable. All of which we knew before Bilski hit the Fed Circuit.

That older Alappat decision opened the door for patentee to write claims for software as being articles of manufacter. ... This is how most software still gets in the door, as the PTO gives it a wink and a nudge doesn't treat it as being "software" at all!

Wrong. While Beauregard claims are commonly used in software patents, they are not the primary vehicle. Claim 1 (the primary and broadest claim) of most software patent applications is a method claim. Beauregard claims are usually the last set of claims, as a "nuclear option" in case courts ever strike down method and system claims. They also have some uses against certain types of infringers. In any case, Beauregard claims are an afterthought. Method claims are where it's at for software.

I've written my share of software patents. Legit ones, not this one-click nonsense that gives the whole field a bad name.

Because the more idiot patents like this that get granted, the sooner this mess will end.
...
First reason - the dumber a patent is, and the more obvious it is that you are merely patenting something someone else came up with - the more likely it is that a judge somewhere will get that clue we've all been waiting for.
...
Second reason - World War I.

Your logic is seriously misguided.

The current situation is in no way any judge's fault. Shaky patents have to be litigated before they can be invalidated. But why risk litigation? Companies know which patents are shaky. You'd never risk taking this patent to court. It's much more effective to let the uncertainty hang over everyone's head, licensing the shaky patents as part of bulk portfolio cross-licensing arrangements with other major patent holders.

Even if this patent went to court, no judge would fix the entire patent mess in one fell swoop. First, patents are invalidated by juries, not judges (except in rare cases of directed verdicts). Second, no judge will eliminate an entire class of patents like software. That would grossly overstep the bounds of any particular patent case before the judge. Judges leave the broad strokes to Congress. Such a ridiculously broad ruling from a district court would have to survive appeals to the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court. So ultimately your solution requires not "a judge somewhere getting a clue", but five Supreme Court justices sanctioning a heavy-handed betrayal of hundreds of years of judicial authority and precedent. "Not gonna happen" is an epic understatement.

As for "patent World War", that's just as improbable. You said it yourself - companies care about making money. Alliances between them are nothing like the mutual aid treaties that started WW1. No one will rush to defend their allies as soon as it becomes unprofitable. Your patent "war" will fizzle as soon as it starts. Not to mention that if it somehow did, the resulting carnage to the Nasdaq would make things unpleasant for all of us. You don't hammer an entire industry without collateral damage to every 401k and pension plan in existence.

Yes I am a patent lawyer.

The court will simply not invalidate the basis of an existing industry and it has nothing to do with corruption.

Bingo. The Court won't make a decision that far-reaching. Roberts pushes for narrow decisions. They'll leave broad policy matters such as software patents per se to Congress. Even if they did miraculously invalidate software patents entirely based on the current statutes, what would happen? Congress would pass a bill yesterday explicitly authorizing them.

I suspect the Court will broaden the holding of Bilski. Bilski was based on 30 year old rules from a different technological era. The Court didn't accept this case just to affirm the lower decision. Nor will they formulate a stricter rule for the reasons stated above.

Nothing the Court decides is likely to affect software much. Bilski is aimed at egregious business method patents, nothing more. Software patents are just as accepted as before - the PTO simply requires reciting a machine somewhere in the claims. Something like "doing X" becomes "doing X on a processor". That's it.

If you want fundamental changes to the system, you'll have to petition Congress to amend the patent act. Trying to force it through the courts is a waste of time and resources.

Yes I am a patent attorney.

As a lawyer, I'm not surprised by this outcome. I admit to not closely following this case. But from what I've read, her defense arguments were really weak. Oddly enough, Ars Technica says it best:

A vigorous defense from Kiwi Camara and Joe Sibley was not enough to sway the jury, which had only to find that a preponderance of the evidence pointed to Thomas-Rasset. The evidence clearly pointed to her machine, even correctly identifying the MAC address of both her cable modem and her computer's Ethernet port. When combined with the facts about her hard drive replacement (and her failure to disclose those facts to the investigators), her "tereastarr" username, and the new theories that she offered yesterday for the first time in more than three years, jurors clearly remained unconvinced by her protestations of innocence. ...

The case is a reminder that in civil trials, simply raising some doubt about liability is not enough; lawyers need to raise lots of doubt to win the case, and Camara and Sibley were unable to do so here.

I really can't emphasize that last part enough. Winning a civil trial isn't about being "right" in any objective sense. It's about convincing normal people. If your explanations (technical or otherwise) go over their heads or seem implausible, you will lose. If the jury senses any sort of deception or dishonesty, you will lose. Sometimes if they just plain don't like you, you will lose. Clearly erroneous results can get overturned on appeal, but may cases are close enough calls that an appeal won't help.

On the facts above, I'd have found her liable too. It was clearly her computer with a username she commonly used. That creates a reasonable inference that she used Kazaa on it. While there are many ways for her to rebut this presumption, the flimsy conjecture offered doesn't cut it. Especially if she seemed less than forthright.

That said, the damages award is completely insane. I'd have given nominal damages, enough to hurt but not crippling (on the order of $100-500 per song - yes, below the statutory minimum of $750). It will get reduced on appeal, but not to that level. Maybe something on the order of a few thousand per song. My guess is that the jury really disliked her dishonesty and smacked her for it with huge damages.

I won't criticize her lawyers since I don't know all the details. Maybe these were the best arguments they had. Maybe their client chose to use this defense against their recommendations. Undoubtedly the news reports distorted the story. Whatever the case, the defense was really weak. This verdict was predictable.