I don't begrudge them a few patents in exchange for that.

> Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development started in 1993 by Chris Montgomery.[8][9] Intensive development began following a September 1998 letter from the Fraunhofer Society announcing plans to charge licensing fees for the MP3 audio format.[10][11]

This is interesting because "innovation through forced workarounds" has long been one of the ways patents are said to be beneficial. Ogg is a prime example.

Well here's a study showing that the user of the term "troll" had become widely used by media without any evidence to support their negative views. This has led to judges forbidding the use of that term at trials as it is unfairly prejudicial.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2768939

If it is improper in the court of law, one can reasonably assume it is improper in the court of public opinion as well. The effects of this bias can be seen in the usual comments on patent-related threads here and other forums, where the USPTO is regularly derided by people who don't know the first thing about patents. These people know only what the media tells them, and as the paper shows, media is highly biased. This bias is being spread to a large audience and is also being used to push for reform that may not necessarily be balanced. I'd say, yes, such rhetoric is hurting the patent system.

You mean the public that still exchanges terabytes [1] of pirated content every month in the US alone that the rights holders are unable to stop?

1. Sandvine estimates single digit percentage of daily Internet traffic in the US is BitTorrent. That is huge in absolute numbers.

And you have property laws giving you legal control over who gets your physical property and how it gets used. You could, for instance, loan your car to your family all you want, or agencies can rent their cars out as they wish. But the moment some stranger makes off with it, the government law enforcement agencies are obliged to help.

The legal distribution of content is a free market -- there is no government price setting agency and no monopoly more than other forms of ownership -- the public only needs to be better educated about what they are paying for.

Yes but my point is AWS has more mindshare and MS has more leverageable pre-existing business inroads with a huge number of these corporations.

> and Google has done a great job building a solid foundation for this which should pay dividends in the future

That seems rational, but the countless examples of "worse is better" in life indicate that that outcome is far from guaranteed.

Of course, the only reason code is copyright-protected is because it's text, and text can have expressivity and code can be creative. But that does not mean code has creative expression. Most code does not express anything, not in the way other artworks do -- most code exists only to solve specific problems and hence is functional. Sure we can use whatever names we want for the methods and variables but you'll notice they all tend to be very descriptive of what they do. Not much creativity in the text of the code itself (at least for "good" code). All the creativity in software is in the technical ideas, approaches, algorithms and abstractions we use to solve those problems, but unfortunately only patents protect that, if at all.

The real problem here is the use of copyright to protect code. It's a legal hack, enacted because there was nothing better around to use. And to make the hack uglier, binaries enjoy copyright protection because they are "derivative works" from copyright-eligible program code. We need something more appropriate, lying between patents and copyright to protect software.

> Sure. But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now.

To me that translated to: "Sharing some songs between a handful of friends once every few days didn't harm the music industry; hence being able to share hundreds of songs with millions of people in a few seconds will harm it now."

The second statement sure looks like an extrapolation from the first, and given the mind-boggling difference in scale, an invalid one.

As for lack of data, music industry revenues have been decimated since the turn of the industry. Sure, there are several factors involved, but can you really pretend the terabytes of copyrighted music being torrented every month has nothing to do with it?

Not a valid extrapolation. The Internet is billions of times faster and more densely connected than the sneakernet.