> Or, also known as "being in an echo chamber".

There are plenty of those, including, say, IP Watchdog. Yes, some of us have been known to hang out in very pro-patent echo chambers as well.

> The concepts of a Person of Ordinary Skill and Doctrine of Equivalents is not "black boxes".

Complete non sequitur. A black box is a device where the function is known, but not its workings. If something is a black box, it's hard to see how it would satisfy the 'enablement' standard. Well, unless it's black box software, then it's just fine! Judges apparently think that you just tell the computer what to do and it requires no undue experimentation. So you just need someone to come up with the brilliant idea to patent software that simulates the human brain and achieves sentience (or at least passes the Turing test) and everything thereafter is just a matter of typing it in once this disclosed. Yes really, see [1].

> Studies [1, 2], albeit with only publicly available data, have found no empirical evidence of a "modern patent trolling crisis"

They apparently haven't read the newspaper, either, wherein we find that every major tech company is apparently a thief, in spite of the fact that nobody actually reads patents (we're all warned not to, treble damages and all that). Interestingly, widespread reinvention of a patent is not considered empirical proof of obviousness, rather it proves that the idea was really valuable and the patent holder deserves lots of money for discovering that, say, cell phone computers can do email just as well as other computers. Also, we'd best not look at the steadily increasing number of patent cases, nor all of the goings on in Marshall, TX.

> "Machines are made of metals which occur in nature, which are SCOTUS identified ineligible subject matter."

You're confusing "contains" with "is" here. I've also seen patent lawyers try to do a reductio ad absurdam saying that software is hardware (read some of the Patently O comments...). Apparently they don't realize that software is information and that numbers are no different than any other form of information. And, as with your broken logic, we can say that hardware contains information [software], but it's quite ridiculous to say that hardware is information.

> I'm genuinely curious: how do you judge the quality of a patent?

By how much of it is actually new. If someone comes up with a new computing device, some idiot will try to patent having it do email, web surfing and everything else we already know that computers can do.

> When we first mined metals, we have done so expecting to make things out of them. Using a metal for its expected and customary use is not subject to patents beyond the patents on the metal itself."

We can actually enumerate all of the programs that can go on a particular computer. It's the set of integers from zero to the largest number that would fit in memory (most of these are not useful, however). I don't believe you can do that with all things that could be made of metal, moreover the metal's properties are altered in certain combinations (e.g. amalgams) whereas the computer's properties are not altered by the information on it--the computer is still performing an instruction loop over the data it contains.

[1] This is a real howler for programmers, found quoted on Patently O: Fonar Corp. v. General Electric Co., 107 F.3d 1543, 1549, 41 USPQ2d 1801, 1805 (Fed. Cir. 1997) (“As a general rule, where software constitutes part of a best mode of carrying out an invention, description of such a best mode is satisfied by a disclosure of the functions of the software. This is because, normally, writing code for such software is within the skill of the art, not requiring undue experimentation, once its functions have been disclosed. * * * Thus, flow charts or source code listings are not a requirement for adequately disclosing the functions of software.”).