And, just as today's Biotech industry is opposed to any patent reform, the 19th century had powerful advocates for the status quo, including Thomas Edison, who argued that any revision of the patent statues would "strongly tend to discourage and prevent perfection of useful inventions by those most fitted for that purpose..."
Yes, it's sixty pages (double spaced) with tons of footnotes, but if you skip the footnotes and skim the text, there's plenty here to interest any engineer who's had occasion to learn the words "patent troll.".
This takes the perspective of economists, not just engineers. Software patents are quite consistently seen as harmful.
When processes favour those who are more wealthy (or more willing to go into infinite debt or steal money of other people) those processes match the attributes of lawfare rather than law
So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
