> If you will excuse my directness, all of these arguments come across as 'it isn't fair that they're bigger than we are.'
Fairness has nothing to do with it. It's obvious that large entities have more power than small entities, but that's hardly an excuse to give them more. Especially when the argument being made is that it will help small entities which it empirically does not.
> Gigantic, established companies will always have an edge, regardless of patents. Abolishing the system and creating a wild-west scenario is ridiculous.
There should be corollary to Godwin's law that anyone who describes the tech industry as the wild west automatically loses the argument. There are no gunslingers here. You've already listed plenty of reasons why Microsoft is not going to be felled overnight by some startup in the absence of software patents.
> Reform and overhaul using principles guided by rational, current, and quantifiable evaluation, with an established timeline for recurring review and reform.
There is nothing to reform. The essential failure isn't in the specifics of the law, it's in the concept of patenting what is fundamentally information. Under the same law the patent system works largely as it's expected to in the pharmaceutical industry or the auto industry. It fails spectacularly in the software industry because software is not supposed to be patentable subject matter.
Fairness has nothing to do with it. It's obvious that large entities have more power than small entities, but that's hardly an excuse to give them more. Especially when the argument being made is that it will help small entities which it empirically does not.
> Gigantic, established companies will always have an edge, regardless of patents. Abolishing the system and creating a wild-west scenario is ridiculous.
There should be corollary to Godwin's law that anyone who describes the tech industry as the wild west automatically loses the argument. There are no gunslingers here. You've already listed plenty of reasons why Microsoft is not going to be felled overnight by some startup in the absence of software patents.
> Reform and overhaul using principles guided by rational, current, and quantifiable evaluation, with an established timeline for recurring review and reform.
There is nothing to reform. The essential failure isn't in the specifics of the law, it's in the concept of patenting what is fundamentally information. Under the same law the patent system works largely as it's expected to in the pharmaceutical industry or the auto industry. It fails spectacularly in the software industry because software is not supposed to be patentable subject matter.