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"So, for most of the world, the Gregorian calendar has been the law for 250-425 years. That's a well-established standard by anyone's definition. Who would possibly ignore it or get it wrong at this point?

If you guessed "Microsoft", you may advance to the head of the class."

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/10/leap-back.html

Tips on writing a "standard":

http://www.robweir.com/blog/index.html

"So, for most of the world, the Gregorian calendar has been the law for 250-425 years. That's a well-established standard by anyone's definition. Who would possibly ignore it or get it wrong at this point?

If you guessed "Microsoft", you may advance to the head of the class."

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/10/leap-back.html

Tips on writing a "standard":

http://www.robweir.com/blog/index.html

--First, there are a surprising number of people who are not decided on the software patent thing. Many of them work in the Senate and House office buildings. Frankly, those guys were my primary target audience, and I've made sure that at least a few of them get copies of the book, because lobbyists for certain corporations are talking to the same people. It's the least I could do.

[And as you can imagine, handing them a book works a whole lot better than handing them a web page printout.]

--Second, I can tell you that many people who are pro-software patent are reading the book---notably, patent attorneys. They are looking for exactly what many people in this thread are looking for: a decent solution to the warts that the system has displayed to date.

--Third, among those who are opposed to software patents, there's a lot of misinformation, and I feel the debate is often going in the wrong direction. After studying the question for a few years, I strongly believe that the problem is not about obviousness, and it's not about details of enforcement.

I wrote the book, and made sure that Chapter 6 was online (the review links to it) to bring forth what I take to be the root cause: patents make no sense in a decentralized industry like software. [For more explanation of this point, read the fine chapter.]

Even if I were only preaching to the choir, I felt that pushing the debate away from obviousness and enforcement, and toward questions of patents in a decentralized industry, would be a valuable contribution.

--Fourth, you'll notice that many of the commenters who got past the first sentence of the review are looking for a decent line between software/business method patents and more traditional patents. I'm sorry if this sounds like I'm plugging my own book, but it's very difficult to draw that line in a comment thread or a 750 word article. There's a case history for context, and questions about the effects various lines could have, and questions about testing the limits of any distinction. I can't count how many people have asked me `yeah, well what about FPGAs', so FPGAs got a page or two.

Those who think that the question is interesting, whether they agree with me or not, are picking up the book.

So, that's why I wrote a book about a polarized topic, and my understanding of who's reading it.

--You're welcome to find a pro-software patent book, except there aren't any. The best you'll find are a few academic articles, most published since my book came out, that just fail to reject the hypothesis that software patents do no harm.