Speaking of embarrassing, you're embarrassing people who advocate against patents, with your incoherent vehemence. The comments you've been responding to have been civil and contributory to the conversation, and your responses, I think, have been less than civil and perhaps not very well-crafted towards contribution.

If the rest of this comment appears to be a personal attack, I apologize; I would ask that it be read as an analysis of the above thread, with an eye to improving future discourse.

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The fact is, people DO make arguments of a moral nature in favour of patents. And last I checked, there's no gold standard in validity of moral arguments. Your opening salvo ("no moral justification for patents, period") is interpretable as either a claim about the behaviour of humans, or a claim about universal ethics; that would make it obviously false or obviously laughable, respectively.

You ALSO, in your opening salvo, misrepresented patents ("you are not allowed to think of... and then trade..."), and Confusion fairly-politely tried to help you out. You replied with "No, you misunderstand ethics", which aside from being a rude escalation of conflict is also a non sequitur (since the use of "No" implies you're replying to his/her content, which you weren't).

THEN, Confusion was again polite and outlined a moral argument which has been taken by many participants in the broader societal discussion about patents, including the ones who make the laws in several countries over a few hundred years. She/he was even clear that the consequences alleged by this argument, with respect to the public good, appear to be at least partially divergent from the consequences observed in reality, AND explicitly pointed out that the argument isn't unassailable ("That is a valid moral argument. Which doesn't mean you have to agree with it.").

I think any reasonable observer would agree that there IS a moral argument in favour of patents. It has some premises that not everyone agrees with (e.g. a sort of utilitarian framework). It also contains some contentious claims about the interaction between incentive structures and behaviour (e.g. inventors wouldn't invent, AND/OR drug companies wouldn't do FDA testing, without patent "protection"), which are clearly hard to test the truth of, and many reasonable people disagree about to what extent they are true. (I myself find the "drug company" argument very persuasive (I agree with kevinalexbrown above), and the "inventor" argument highly suspect (I mostly agree with you, below, in your comment about Tesla and Torvalds), but the point is that intelligent thoughtful people (or even HN commenters) can disagree about these things.

Hopefully I don't have to go into detail about how opening a post with "This is horribly embarrassing argument." is nothing more than verbal abuse.

And your shot about post hoc ergo propter hoc is a little missing the point: while some crazy person COULD say "look we got an internet because of the patent system, therefore we were right about patents", and I take your point about that hypothetical argument being an instance of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, I don't think anybody actually does make that argument. We all know we haven't sampled the universe in two states, and we all know that we're arguing about untested hypotheticals (about what WOULD happen with less patents or more patents, and about what WOULD HAVE happened in the past say 50 years).

And one last complaint about your rhetoric: while I acknowledge that ultimately any law (at least in all extent societies) is ultimately backed up by threat of violence, and thus in some sense law is violence, it's ludicrous to conflate the enforcement of near-consensus with violence. Unless you literally meant violence, and literally meant "gets the tar beaten out of him", in which case of course we all know that's not what happens to those who lose in patent fights. What happens is that profits that they have taken, which are judged by the courts to have been earned in violation of the framework of law, are taken away, and/or they are required to make good profits that they have been judged to have unfairly denied to others. Much as other proscribed commercial activity (e.g. fraudulent product misrepresentation, e.g. cartels) would be penalized. So, either way, your phrasing about violence is at best a distraction, at worst a falsehood.

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The thing is, it's weird having to write this little attack on your little attacks, because I agree that the first-world patent system has raged dysfunctionally out of control, and is stifling innovation rather than promoting it. (That's ALL it's doing wrong, mind you, because if you stick to 30-year-old products and technologies, you'll never notice this stuff. But I want to live in the FUTURE, never mind the present!) But I think the argument is narrower than you make it seem (again, consider drug companies), and I think we could afford to keep it more civil than I read you to have done, at least among basically-reasonable people.

Hopefully I have myself managed to avoid destructive incivility.