Annoying that Marco seems to have taken many of his talking points from This American Life's "When Patents Attack" episode -- without attribution, and mangling the facts in the process!
Toast patent -- featured in the episode.
Saying IV shell companies only sue people -- misrepresentation of something in the episode; companies affiliated with IV sue people, but some IV shell companies may only be used to acquire and license patents (thus their shell companies do not "only sue people" as Marco says).
Marco does not address the popular notion that software patents should be wholesale dropped as a way to fix the problem.
Also more substantial and less nieve (ie. not from somebody who listened to the TIL episode, read wikipedia for 15 minutes, and then decided to write a blog post)
I can't understand why you think Patel's article is better. I will grant that it is well written, but the argument is practically non-existent.
First, it's nowhere near a similar argument. Patel argues that software patents are fundamentally sound, they're just implemented poorly.
This article instead argues a position closer to my own which is that software patents are fundamentally broken because they can't be implemented correctly. The assumption in Patel's argument is that it's possible for the USPTO to police software patents effectively. Thus far this has not been shown to be the case. The argument in this blog post is that because of the nature of governmental regulation, this is impossible to do effectively. After reaching this conclusion, the conclusion must be that software patents are fundamentally broken.
Patel can make an argument that this is possible, but he doesn't.
Toast patent -- featured in the episode.
Saying IV shell companies only sue people -- misrepresentation of something in the episode; companies affiliated with IV sue people, but some IV shell companies may only be used to acquire and license patents (thus their shell companies do not "only sue people" as Marco says).
Marco does not address the popular notion that software patents should be wholesale dropped as a way to fix the problem.
So what is the point of this article?