Assuming you're a believer in capitalism and free markets, you should be thrilled to encourage and protect "cheapenators" the world over. God bless them. They're the reason the system works. The more the merrier!

What we have these days, unfortunately, are a bunch of lazy communists who think that their business should get special protections instead of having to compete, which is just so hard for the poor widdle baby CEOs. Their mommy told them they were entitled to fat profit margins on their work ("innovating is so expensive!"), and if some upstart can out-compete them on price, it's just... not... fair!!!!!

So they spend their time coming up with ways to change the rules of the free market so as to make it less free. Never mind that they themselves only got where they are today by using the ideas of others. Now they've got theirs, and they want to make sure no one else can ever take it.

These are the guys whining about how the "cheapenators" stole their precious ideas, and we all need to band together to make sure that precious "intellectual property" can't be "stolen" from the monopoly- I mean, inventor. Instead of competing, they spend their time suing and lobbying, trying to gradually expand the scope of copyright, patents (i.e. creating "software patents"), and other protectionist schemes.

It is anti-capitalist. It's a plot by people who want to change the US to have an institutionalized wealthy upper class, whose status is protected by laws and handed down family lines through generations, like they have in Asia. And they know it's so repugnant they have to do it very gradually. For that matter, deep down they may even know it's economically counterproductive. So there's an element of denial about it thrown in as well. So right now it's just policy ideas (like strengthening "IP") that just so happen to have this effect.

Slashdot, I present to you a case study: the intelligent person arguing in bad-faith.

We've seen them before. But let's study the technique in this case.

Technique: "the bold summary." The skimmers in the audience may be fooled.

Of course, he could have claimed it gladly, had he explained how any software developer can determine what they infringe upon.

Or if he had said, "Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. have a patent compliance process for all their code, and here is where you can read about it..." But he knows that no one can tell the full set of patents they violate, and so no one can avoid violating a large number of patents. He knows these companies and the elite few others who can afford it build their own portfolio to countersue when sued, and all others exist on sufferance. And he even knows about the patent troll problem - even if just from us. He makes no comment on this state of affairs. Perhaps it suits him.

Note that we are so awash in bad patents, he chooses the "goalpost moving" argument - "opponent framing" - "trees for forest arguing" - rather than actually finding patents he thinks are defensible. Since the latter would have been such a stronger retort, he undercuts himself rather amusingly.

Here the psychology of the debater becomes apparent. He sees the argument as a theatrical performance for others. When someone will go into hysterical paroxysms of verbal illogic rather than concede any point, they similarly assume that others would feel the same. This is the worldview of an egotist with a contemptible notion of his intelligence versus yours.

Should he even engage the software patent quality issue honestly - which he has seemed reluctant to do, and if the crowd could list 10 terrible patents for every good one he finds... if in fact this goalpost can be moved by an entire football field and not change the central point - that software patents are destructive, ludicrous, utterly indefensible in both design and track record... but no. We have goal post feng shui.

This technique - authoritative statement of lies (or "incorrect facts" if we're being polite) - is still surprisingly common, despite the fact that the truth can often be had in the first result of a google search:

http://www.fr.com/patentdamages/

Damages can be set at a reasonable royalty, which can be anything in your imagination. Courts also have the discretion to award "lost profits" beyond this royalty - so any hypothetical economic damage - and then triple the number.

From 1991 to 1996, there were at least eight cases in which patent damages exceeded $100 million. Since then, the number of damages awards that have reached eight – and even nine – figures have steadily risen. Indeed, patent cases now make up a significant number of the largest jury awards in the United States.

This is a particularly clever technique: the out of context quote. In this quote, you can clearly see Theaetetus thanking me, in gratitude for proving him wrong.

Hahaha. In fact, his full quote is:

He has played this trick as I point out that the presence of prior art is both incredibly common and of little use to defendants in patent lawsuits, who must engage in incredibly expensive, risky civil litigation regardless of whether the plaintiff's claim has merit. They virtually never do (see the earlier point on patent quality) and yet some trials have famously dragged on for years. Most victims are not the famous ones you hear about in the news (like Google and Microsoft). They are the little companies, or the medium-sized ones, with no budget for patent barratry. They have no choice but to settle - making this legal regime a facilitator of what, in proletarian terms, is nothing more than back-alley mugging. Worse, many great businesses and great ideas die in their cradle - or go overseas - where one can build a software business without helplessly waiting for criminals to sneak up behind you in a dark alley and extract your money.

This is more "authoritative lying" - though with the misuse of terminology and the legal citation we are perhaps more in "deceptive substitution," "fake lawyer" or "bad legal advice" territory.

Imagine company A and company B, each of which uses an abbreviation technique for backwards compatibility of long strings with old software. After many years, company A patents the technique (true story, but with vastly more companies than 2, see patent #5579517). In litigation, Company B can no longer find a remedy in filing their own patent and attempting to discover whether they were "first to invent."

Now the attempt at deception is obvious. As an extra sad note about first-to-file - which only heightens how little the patent regime is concerned with helping inventors, fostering invention or promoting progress:

Canada changed from FTI to FTF in 1989. One study found that the "reforms had a small adverse effect on domestic-oriented industries and skewed the ownership structure of patented inventions towards large corporations, away from independent inventors and small businesses." --Wikipedia

Here we see not only "authoritative lying" but "sleight of hand." Indeed software patents did not spring from congress, as he knows. In fact, as any widely available history of the topic covers the lack of legislation at its core:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent

the power grab took place over 20 years ago. But the passage of a law merely a few months ago (which seemed most concerned at giving a few lobbyists a narrow exemption from software patent mugging) can be used in a cleverly constructed sentence to make it seem as though software patents were designed in Congress decades ago.

More bad legal advice - and a fun bit of bravado. He bets you will not click on the link provided. :)

Especially amusing because the controversy, and Europe's rejection of US-style software patents, was widely covered on Slashdot over a period of months.

A particularly neat technique here: "spurious analysis." The propagandist attempts to sound scholarly, using a term like "cutting out of context" to attempt to complicate the explanation of how tenuous software patents are in the context of existing jurisprudence (and common sense) in the mind of the reader.

Also amusing - this is a forum populated by many people versed in the art, who will not be especially likely to be confused.

A rarely seen "take proof of your error and pretend you have seen an admission of your correctness." More common among 5 year olds than apparently literate adults. He is far from the first to try this technique here, surely - but the juxtaposition with other more sophisticated attempts at deception make it interesting. Like a using a dash of crude whiskey as part of the sauce on an otherwise delicate souffle of lies. Piquant!

A classic - implying an error while declining to argue it (usually because one can't).

I do like his sense of humor. This was actually clever! :)

I am fascinated by your post - which I contains so much information that is outright wrong as to appear to be a deliberate attempt to advocate by deception.

Can you cite a software patent that has merit? I have read close on 50 at this point and seen hundreds of summaries and have yet to see it.

For further reference, a post by a different user.

This is part of how software patents kill the economy and destroy jobs, because the "damages" are a legal negotiation of unlimited dimension and cost, that can be held at any time with hundreds or thousands of unknown individuals, some of whom may just be trolls out for a quick mugging, and some may be convicted monopolists like Microsoft who wish to destroy potentially competitive businesses rather than negotiate a "fair" price for, I don't know, their patent on page up and page down. Then their license cannot be had at any cost.

Or you can just not go into business. Which was the point, originally.

That was great, it was true.

You'll notice that this didn't mitigate the software patent problem at all, since prior art is virtually ubiquitous among software patents.

You still get to have a multimillion dollar lawsuit proving it. So, discovery, evidentiary quality, motions, debate over applicability, etc etc. All at $500 per hour, on both sides.

But your own AIA instituted First to File, so you are precisely wrong, now, no?

Software and "Business Method" Changes: There has been much debate in recent years in the software community about the propriety of software patents, and the America Invents Act does little to clear that up, except in a few minor niches. One provision, for example, specifically excludes tax preparation software from a rule prohibiting the patenting of tax strategies, and another creates a way to defeat patents related to financial products, with the aim of quashing a certain group of patents for check-imaging software.

--5 Key Facts About Patent Reform Act

A categorical and obvious lie. Please see the Proposed Directive on the Patentability of Computer-implemented Inventions of 2002.

There will always be gray areas, as there are in the EU (where patenting software is, if not impossible, very difficult), but the attempt to bring a US-style, "liberal" software patent regime to Europe categorically failed, and the ensuing controversy shed light on the underlying issue: that large companies, especially American ones, had the idea of using patent law as an tool to prevent competition.

The UK is following the EU. India and China do indeed reject them. I'm unaware of Russia or Brazil's policy. But their policies, collectively, matter at least as much as the US and EU.

Japan, South Korea, and some others do allow software patents as of now. Hence this gem from wikipedia:

In South Korea, software is considered patentable and many patents directed towards "computer programs" have been issued.[23] In 2006, Microsoft was ordered to halt sales of its "Office" suite due to a patent infringement ruling by the Supreme Court of Korea.[24][not in citation given] The company was found to have infringed upon patents directed towards automatic language translation within software programs.[24][not in citation given]

Software is math. The original Babbage and Turing conceptions of computing were given in the language of math, and all software can be trivially expressed in mathematical terms.

Your grasp of Gottschalk v. Benson is also "vanishingly" slight. But yes, software concepts are abstract ideas in exactly the way that mathematical equations are.

Obviously.

The Court merely agreed that Bilski sought to patent an abstract idea and held that such abstract ideas were unpatentable.

A majority opinion authored by Justice Kennedy agreed that the Federal Circuit’s “machine-or-transformation” test at least “is a useful and important clue an investigative tool ” for patentability but not the sole or exclusive test. The five-justice majority opinion also rejected a rule that all business methods are unpatentable. Four justices would have held that methods of doing business are unpatentable (Justices Stevens Ginsburg Breyer and Sotomayor).

By watering down the CAFC’s “machine-or-transformation” test the Supreme Court regrettably failed to provide guidance in the future about business method patents. For example suppose a patent claim is not clearly unpatentable as just an abstract idea but it does fail the now-optional “machine-or-transformation” test. When will such a claim be patentable? The Court did not answer that question or provide details about how to apply its “abstract idea” test.
--EFF

I notice you have not argued any of my larger points, which are that the vast majority of companies and all individuals ignore patents, that it is impossible for anyone to determine infringement, that not even the largest companies try, that as economic policy software patents are significantly bad, with results including the laughable creation of patent trolls. You have not explained how a domestic software industry can operate should we end the near-universal practice of ignoring software patents.

I take it this is because you have no way to argue them, even with your most creative attempts at deception.

But forget all that. Obviously you're not going to fool me, and anyone else can fact check their way out of your childish attempt at propaganda pretty easily. I'm just curious about you personally. What's your deal? Lawyer? MS employee?

OK. Here's how software patents work.

There are hundreds of thousands of them. None of them required any investment to develop. They simply memorialize things that everyone always did - commenting inside of curly braces, using tables for compression, having the "AM" flip to "PM" when you scroll the hours past noon, having plugins in web browsers and "one click purchase buttons" and so forth.

No one can ever know what their work infringes on. Not even Microsoft or Google, who have carte blance budgets for such things. They simply write code and wait to get sued.

Even if the software patent fairy came down and waved her little magic wand, and you could know exactly which hundreds or thousands of patents you infringed, it would be worthless by tomorrow. Thousands of new patents are filed every day.

The only effect that software patents can have is to make every piece of code a ticking patent time bomb.

The scam was supported by a few, like Microsoft, because they saw it as a way to prevent competition and hurt free markets. They need only send part of their multi-million dollar legal team to the patent mines and amass a "war chest" that would enable them to sue others, and countersue when they were, themselves, inevitably brought to court. This would have the effect of making it impossible for anyone to write software without having a multi-million (these days multi-billion) investment in patent lawyers.

The only reason the U.S. has a functioning software industry is that the practice of using these patents is so repugnant and ridiculous that most businesses and all individuals ignore them.

Unfortunately, in their haste, cupidity and basic ignorance of cause an effect, backers like Microsoft neglected to realize that they would create a new kind of company, called a patent troll. These companies would buy patents that Microsoft was violating, and sue them. But Microsoft's patent war chest would be unusable as a defense, because patent trolls are very careful to do absolutely no useful work of any kind. Their entire business is suing the people who do actually do useful work. MS has already had 9-10 figures in judgments come in against them from trolls and they have had a few close calls with actually having to pay out.

If you are wondering who created software patent law, the answer is, not congress. Some lawyers tried it, and it flew, and it's happened all on its own - a little power grab by the patent bar and the USPTO.

This is partly why so few industrialized countries other than the U.S. have a software patent regime the way we do, because it is so prima facie ridiculous. They have been rejected in Europe and Asia. We are an international laughing stock for having such an obviously corrupt practice.

Meanwhile there is very little basis for software patent law to exist even on this basis in the U.S.. The Supreme Court has already famously struck down patents on i.e. math equations, which are vanishingly similar. They came quite close to explicitly striking down software patents already in En Re Bilski. The whole game will be up before long - no one has any choice. The more the practice grows, the faster it chokes itself off.

Good day, sir. Respond if you like, I won't read it.

I think at this point a great many are over it (Google, IBM, and the entire FOSS industry) and if enough of the patent countersuits succeed against Apple and Microsoft (the most prominent non-troll offenders), there will be a time where even they are willing to stop throwing good money after bad.

I suspect many execs who would not publicly admit it are getting sick of the patent lawyers already.

You have a wonderfully deadpan approach to sarcasm. Well played. :)

And by reform, I mean, abolition?

Come on guys. It never works. The only people getting rich off it are the lawyers. The rest of the world is laughing at us over it.

Let's put those dollars towards creating jobs and innovating.

Hello, Obama? Anyone home? There's a campaign donation in it for you from a few big tech luminaries, I'm pretty sure.

The only thing that's way the hell off base is talking about Windows Mobile in 2012 without a laugh track.

Say it with me: Dead. Letter.

This might be a wonderful phone made by sweet people... though, in fact, it's a mediocre phone made by a convicted monopolist and purveyor of notoriously terrible closed-source platforms and a cell phone maker so many years behind the times they're lucky they have RIM to make them look good. Regardless, it needed to come out 5 years ago. As it happens I have used one. It's a hilarious failure at imitating Android or iOS. The industrial design and UI trim are adequate. But even if it wasn't buggy enough that it had to be given away for free, it offers nothing compelling enough to assail an established, dominant OS - a difficult problem which Microsoft of all companies should be familiar with. :)

Hold it in your hands all you want. For that matter, whine like the WebOS guys after the stores don't have them anymore. That will increase my amusement.

It's an epic-making disaster. Microsoft...Windows...Smartphone...? Really?

Nokia shareholders, sue your CEO.

The only bright spot is that this is an industry, unlike finance, where awful decisions by management actually can cause a company to go bankrupt.

Android, you mean. WebOS wouldn't qualify on the easy API part - in their attempt to make a rich client OS with web stack technologies, they failed, as the senior architects behind it practically admitted.

Personally I prefer writing clients in the Android APIs versus anything in the web world. Javascript is a nightmare to ship anything significant in. That's why so much of it is generated from another, better language these days.

Well, you like what you like. I personally found WebOS's UI to be uninspiring, but certainly neither Android nor iOS are the be-all end-all either.

Android does not tie you to an account. Even stock Android lets you skip that and then you just don't get the services that rely on it. A perfectly good choice, although those services are both free/ad-supported and quite awesome. Then you have the Android variants including the community-developed ones. so if you don't like being offered the option to put account credentials into the phone on first use, it can be removed.

Only in the Bush era could a treasury-looting boondoggle this bad actually go all the way to implementation.

These machines can be defeated by any illiterate petty criminal. Hello... body cavities?

Every actually respectable expert is on record against them, from Bruce Schneier to El Al's former head of security.

This is not just garden variety incompetence. The program was so wildly and thoroughly stupid that it goes beyond negligence into prima facie malicious intent. The bigs from the vendors and the feds on the procurement side should see prison on the grounds of corruption alone. It's no different than selling the army a billion dollars worth of non-working guns or vehicles to pocket the profits. God willing, someday we'll watch the trials on CSpan.

That's leaving aside the laugh-till-you-cry repugnant aspects of what they actually did - which is, let's not sugar coat it, take nude photographs of thousands and thousands of children.

Only in the Bush era could a treasury-looting boondoggle this bad actually go all the way to implementation.

These machines can be defeated by any illiterate petty criminal. Hello... body cavities?

Every actually respectable expert is on record against them, from Bruce Schneier to El Al's former head of security.

This is not just garden variety incompetence. The program was so wildly and thoroughly stupid that it goes beyond negligence into prima facie malicious intent. The bigs from the vendors and the feds on the procurement side should see prison on the grounds of corruption alone. It's no different than selling the army a billion dollars worth of non-working guns or vehicles to pocket the profits. God willing, someday we'll watch the trials on CSpan.

That's leaving aside the laugh-till-you-cry repugnant aspects of what they actually did - which is, let's not sugar coat it, take nude photographs of thousands and thousands of children.

Like Palm, these people squandered a multi-year lead. They had a lock on a wonderful customer base and supplied the dominant smartphone-precursor device to the world, and failed to follow up on through an inability to execute. What happened to the original scrappy, farsighted RIM, that created the Blackberry platform to begin with? Gone - eaten up in the ugly process of becoming a large incumbent business. Now they live on inertia, and their management can't execute their way out of a paper bag. An old story, and a common one.

It has been obvious for many months that RIM was a dead letter - not just behind in the race but lapped many times by multiple competitors. I mean, the Playbook? Really? If you weren't short RIM, sue your broker.

These distinctions, while quite valid in their context, are irrelevant to the creators of alternative platforms that take a holistic approach to developer productivity and capability. Android is a platform that is composed of languages, APIs and tools that work extremely well together as a coherent whole, benefiting from synergies that can only occur as each part is made to fit with the others. HTML5 is a sloppy mess that is half attempts at incremental evolution by pragmatists who want to offer rich client features to an already deployed web browser audience, and half accident.

700k+ smartphone OS devices sell in a day. They are already bleeding over into non-mobile form factors. Developers care about two things: what can I do and how easily can I do it? If the browser teams don't get their act together, in a few years the best answers to those questions will not involve Javascript or the DOM if the majority of users see the web browser as just another app they don't use much anymore, because it's slower, uglier, less reliable, and more complicated to use than another app, that they can find in their menu of apps, or install from a marketplace of apps.

WebOS interestingly was an attempt to leapfrog the standards bodies and build a viable platform with Javascript/HTML/CSS. It failed, so it's up to the remaining players now if they want to keep trying.

OK, I get it. Javascript is the best client scripting language around, and you know better than Google. And "doing what an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest does" is uniquely easier in Javascript. I could give you a free education in the relative merits of Javascript versus language X, Y, or Z, but really, you're starting from too far behind intellectually for a slashdot post to help you. Not to mention, recapping a decade worth of widely known debate in the language design community is a waste of time if you won't believe it from me anyway, right? And what are the odds, if you didn't believe it from all the quarters of the internet it was already coming from? Such as, oh I don't know, just for instance, the authors of the largest, most complex, and most widely used rich-client Javascript applications?

Other languages are out there to be explored - you may find them interesting or you may hate them. But if you pick favorites more easily than you pick up new platforms, you could find yourself out in the cold when your favorites become obsolete. I leave you with that - good luck.