They're paid by the software producer. Now, sure, they pass that cost on to the consumer, but complaining about that is like complaining about capitalism in general. "Why should I have to pay extra for my food because the farmer has to buy seed and fertilizer?"

Except it's (i) only a state-granted monopoly on a single file format, and those upstarts are free to make any other file format they want (see, e.g. Ogg, MP3, WAV, AIFF, etc., etc.); and (ii) it's not even a monopoly that locks people out. It's a standard, so it can't be used for an injunction - they just have to pay a reasonable royalty.

Hence AIFF and WAV, formats that have been around for decades and are free and clear of any patent protection. Full compatibility, hooray!

Oh, wait, that's not good enough - you want access to the latest and greatest perceptual audio coding systems, but don't want to pay even a small royalty for it... So pirate it. That's what everyone else does, and they're not going to go after an individual for a single copy.

But, wait, that's not what you want either... You want to become a commercial distributor, making thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands in revenue, a new "upstart" in the marketplace, but you don't want to have to pay your suppliers. Yeah, I can't sympathize. Sorry.

Weird Al writes new lyrics and sometimes, new arrangements. The Beastie Boys used sampling and remixes to make an entirely new song. Johnny Cash simply performed a cover with the original lyrics and music. If "someone likes my version better" is enough to destroy a copyright owner's rights in the original, then under your theory, Glee just destroyed most music copyrights and shouldn't ever have to pay royalties. Is that what you want? A world with more versions of Glee?

The format is just a container. You can get that song in the MP4 format in an MP3 format, or as an Ogg file, or a WAV, or an AIFF, etc., etc. How does a patent on the MP4 format prevent you from getting at the material? Unless your real complaint is that the manufacturer only provides it in one format... in which case, isn't your real problem with the manufacturer, not the patent?

It's like complaining that you only have a flathead screwdriver but your new shelving system requires Phillips or Robertson, and therefore screws shouldn't be patentable.

George Martin released A Feast for Crows in 2005, but didn't release A Dance with Dragons until 2011, so Game of Thrones is public domain under your suggestion and HBO need not pay him royalties?

Design patents aside, of course.

You're saying a better way to handle it is to get no legal protection and just hope that Zynga never decides to copy them? Worse insanity, particularly because we've seen it fail, over and over.

Patent litigation is frequently done on contingency. That's like saying "I can't afford to have you place a bet for me, because if it wins, I have to give you a share of the huge pile of free money I get."

Why should it? After all, I believe a wise man once said, "The only way to beat a company that steals your best ideas is to keep coming up with better ones." Similarly, the only way to beat a company that comes up with the best ideas and patents them is to come up with better ones, right? Or pay a reasonable license fee if you can't come up with a better idea.

[Citation needed]. The USPTO currently rejects around 95% of patent applications in this industry, so if they've got a rubberstamp, it says "DENIED".

If you read anything in detail, then ask yourself immediately afterwards if you could think of what you just read, you'd say yes. It's called hindsight. The question is whether any competent developer would have thought of it before reading the patent. And that takes evidence to prove, not a gut feeling based solely on "I understand what I just read, so therefore it must be obvious."

Zynga goes after indie and mobile developers for whom copyright is useless, unlike you giant AAA players. So they're the poster child for why software patents are a horrible idea? That makes no sense. Software patents - or being a multi-million dollar AAA developer - are the only thing that can stop them.

In fact, it's actually the classic story justifying why patents should exist: you've got small innovators whose ideas are copied by a ruthless giant corporation, and other giant corporations - such as your own - ignore the issue.

There are such mechanisms - ex parte reexamination (available from 1981 until 2012) and post-grant review (available since 2012). And it works as you say - a panel of senior examiners review the patent, in response to a challenge, which can be based on obviousness or other issues.

Thing is, it's not started with just someone screaming "that's obvious! Review the patent!" Just like we don't go through a full trial based on someone merely saying "that guy's guilty of a crime!" or "that guy owes me money!", the challenge or complaint has to meet a minimum threshold for likelihood of invalidity/guilt/liability. If you do your homework and search for some good prior art, then you can challenge the patent. If you don't do that homework, and just make a conclusory claim, then your challenge will get immediately dismissed, as it should be.

They haven't forgotten it - what they realize is that they have to prove that a person with ordinary skill in the art could come up with the claimed invention based on the prior art. It's not something as simple as a gut feeling of "this is obvious", particularly because they get that gut feeling after reading the patent application. If it's a really well written application, super clear with tons of explanatory diagrams and examples, the end result should feel pretty obvious, in hindsight... but that says nothing about whether, one day before without reading that application, someone could come up with it.

So, they have to prove obviousness using evidence that was available on that previous day, and specifically, if they can show that all of the elements in the claimed invention were known on that day and could be easily combined, then it's obvious. So, for example, if peanut butter sandwiches are known and riding bicycles is known, then "eating a peanut butter sandwich, but on a bicycle!" is obvious, even if no one has ever done that particular combination before. The question is where there's some element of the invention that no one actually has ever done before - turning at an intersection based on a degree of tire rotation to peanuts crunched per bite ratio exceeding a threshold - then proving that that is obvious gets a lot tougher.

Copyright is great for protecting that specific piece of software from piracy. It does almost nothing to prevent another developer from doing a copycat game. That's why Zynga laughs at copyrights, but does file a bunch of patent applications.

The remaining 30 claims were also quite a bit narrower than Claims 31-35, so this decision wouldn't necessarily indicate they're likely invalid.

It's impressive that you got a several hundred word post out of failure to read the rest of a sentence. The full quote was:

Women tend to be penalized for negotiating, so women have learned not to negotiate very hard. It has to do with hormones or body mass as you are actually an "inquiring mind", which is to say not at all.

The defense strategy was never to argue that he was innocent, it was to argue that he should receive life in prison rather than the death penalty. That will mainly occur over the next few weeks in the sentencing phase of the trial. This first guilt phase could've been done on day 1, but the prosecution wanted to grandstand.

Actually, it's issued patent vs. pending application. And where the EFF overstepped was in violating 35 USC 122(c):

Had the application been issued, that wouldn't be an issue (pun aside), but as the EFF admits in their comments:

So, yeah, it's a pre-issuance protest to the grant of an application, without express written consent of the applicant.

Ah, but this wasn't a single case with a single victim. This was 27 separate charges with literally thousands of victims. It shouldn't be surprising that someone who commits a crime 27 times serves more time than someone who commits it just once, and that yes, even though it may be only a couple of years of time for a single charge, when you aggregate more than two dozen charges, the time starts approaching that served for a more heinous crime.

For comparison, would you say that it was an example of a court getting whacked out that this guy got 20 years in prison even though he didn't kill anyone, unlike your hypothetical drunk driver (his 11 armed robberies notwithstanding)?

It's not. Rather, the number of separate victims and separate instances of crime is the aggravating factor - he was convicted of 6 counts of extortion and 21 counts of identity theft. Going by your math above, that's 12 years for the extortion and 105 years for the identity theft, or 117 years. He got about 1/6th of that, so, if anything, this is light.