Our right to challenge junk patents is under threat

First, most of them are math related, except you get the computer to do the math. You can't (or shouldn't) be able to own or outlaw math.

The last link is a Support Vector Machine as far as I can tell. Those were discovered in like 1964 according to Wikipedia. And then it was patented in 199x? That's absolutely wild

I agree these are novel and not something immediately obvious. I think what's happening (what always happens) is that people overreact and have a hard time finding nuance when they are upset.

Amazon's one-click patent was ridiculous. Is Google's PageRank? Maybe. Is the RSA algorithm or how to train neural networks? I don't know. Encouraging the development of these by granting limited time monopolies on them seems like it would encourage people to develop them, but if there was a different way to reward the inventors I would be interested in the details (i.e. less blanket statements that it would be as good, but reasoned thought at a minimum and data if we are so lucky as to have some).

Sometimes the problem is not the idea but the implementation. Maybe that's the case with some types of patents.

The Wright brothers had a patent on the flight control mechanism that they used to stifle innovation [1]. This problem was so bad that when the US entered the First World War, they were completely unable to produce any aircraft and had to buy them from the French. This ultimately led to Congress intervening to form a patent pool for aircraft patents, a system that persists til now.

In the early days of the Internet (ie Napster and Limewire era) there was a lot of hand-wringing about "stealing" music and how it hurt artists. Almost no artist makes sufficient income from music royalties. Only the very top do. The rest make a living from perfrmances and music IP doesn't impact that. But it does help record companies to explit artists, which is the main point.

The pharmaceutical industry claims patents are necessary for drugs. Thing is, most drug research is undertaken by government funding and then basically just handed over to Big Pharma, who spend most of their money on marketing not R&D. What R&D they do is largely to game the patent system to extend patents without minor but irrelevant changes.

Copyright law is repeatedly extended (in the US) largely to stop Mickey Mouse entering the public domain. At this point I'd be happier with a carve-out specifically for the stupid mouse and let everything else fall into public domain

We do not need intellectual property. For atistic works, 10 years. Max.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war

I see where you're coming from, but I would suggest that this is pretty much an extremist point of view on intellectual property protections. It's easy to say that the online shopping cart is a dumb patent (because it is, and the Supreme Court generally agrees with you), but I think you would be hard pressed to argue against the societal value of patents on integrated circuit technologies, which can take $billions to develop, provide tremendous societal value, and have strategic implications.

Still, that does clarify the viewpoint of the piece to some degree - it suggests that you and the EFF are in favor of "patent accelerationism": make the system so shitty for participants that they abandon it entirely. The system is definitely shitty now, but I don't really see anyone abandoning it.

By the way, VLSI is the remains of a real technology company that went out of business... because its IP was blatantly copied. They had no choice but to sell out to a patent troll.