A correct and more sensible option would be [...] email addresses of users who registered [...] audit the hardware of the remainder through Steam (and it's already capable of this) [...] a small % of legit owners to track down [...] mailshot every game owner [...] game will be disabled in 10 days [...] proper hardware [...] mailshot again [...] proof of purchase within 30 days or risk a perma ban.
Oh yeah, that sounds like a simple, non-intrusive, and useful plan. What could go wrong?
At this point they're looking at a PR nightmare. One wrong permaban could keep this in gamer news for months, influencing a lot of purchases.
They should go the other way with it. Say that it's too bad some people have to try to spoil things, etc, but that it's important to not let that happen and as such release the game free to all Steam users who have any AMD GPU or CPU without any further checks. That way absolutely nobody would be wrongfully denied and their other Steam-using customers would get a freebie just for having an AMD product.
It should be easy to do. Most of a game's sales come in the first few months. Negotiating a larger giveaway after that spike in sales (if there is one) should be pretty cheap as the publisher is looking to bargain-bin it at that point anyway. It'd probably cost AMD less than other ad campaigns and seeing a company trying to make things right instead of pointing the finger would be a better ad - to me - than more bogus benchmarks.
It's funny, "we" used to point to the USSR, China, North Korea, to prove that Communism didn't work, despite that it was far more likely just that brutal totalitarianism doesn't work (well).
Now people are pointing to "us" as proof that the free market doesn't work which is hilarious because we've never tried it.
The *last* thing Apple, Microsoft, SCO, Oracle, RAMBUS, etc, want is to have a free market where they'd have to compete on merits alone. Apple could do it, but would hate having to get its fingernails dirty actually competing on price. The rest would be dead in a week without our laws providing them passive rent-type income, mostly from the work of others.
And your prickish attitude is why I crack everything I buy. It's bad enough shelling out $60 for a buggy product, but to jump through a bunch of hoops to have some monkey tell me it's defective by design is unbearable.
I bought a Blizzard game (WC2 era) and it wouldn't run because I had a CD burner. I emailed Blizzard and asked for a workaround - they suggested I buy a new CD drive (then $80 or more). I suggested a crack, they told me it'd be illegal, I told them knowingly selling a defective product was illegal... It stalled there.
Now I don't buy a game (a big title with DRM - Indie Bundle stuff is different) until working cracks are available. Especially as I like to replay games (years later, in emulators, under wine, etc) and DRM is ridiculously fragile.
As long as there's a socially-recognized need to provide for censorship
There isn't. But there's always some totalitarian twerp willing to stack the discussion by bringing up statistically nonexistent things, or unpleasant things like kiddy porn that are only a symptom of the still unaddressed actual abuse, and try to use peer pressure to make it look like anyone who wants an uncensored net is really a secret freak or naive.
The only way to make [censorship] work truly fairly, in my opinion
Oh yeah, that's what the world needs, the uninformed opinion of someone whose best idea is limiting speech for great justice.
make it very difficult to censor unless one can provide proof
Oh yeah, so you mean make it trivially easy and give the keys to some bureaucrat who will push the button whenever given a properly signed form?
So yeah, let's just re-architect the internet into a centralized thing, require ID for anything, mandate government-key-escrow style crypto for everything (to remove the need for all other crypto), make all other crypto illegal to allow the scan for things needing censoring, and maintain an huge database of links and content hashes we've marked. Not to mention the hacking target that we've created...
And that doesn't even touch on the bureaucracy inherent in the censoring organization, let along in the auditing process require to be able to recognize and ultimately undo mistaken censoring, etc.
Wow.
Because you're easily led, panicky, and morally outraged by the skin of your own species, you want to break the internet almost entirely, enact a trillion-dollar government boondoggle, then funnel all communications and business through that boondoggle. Or had you not thought of any of the consequences of your desires?
Awesome business strategy. Sell something broken and complain about the childish customers who aren't willing to fix it.
They have an obligation to provide what they said they'd provide. A game isn't anything like "a bunch of hoops involving UPC codes, photos, and ID, then, maybe, a game".
Perhaps, but if they generate them cryptographically (hash random strings to generate more-random keys) there won't be a practical way.
It's (usually) not like it used to be where the keys were just a pattern thing, now your specific key is looked up and if it's not there it doesn't let you in.
Ohhh, good idea. I haven't noticed the problem myself but a lot of people complain about coupon redeemers so they'd probably try a free app to avoid them.
It's got iPhone written all over it.
It sounds fun. Have you written this sort of thing before? Were you serious?
If not I might do a web app of it - scrape Groupon/etc and build a list of what to avoid and when.
Can't do that till we get rid of the grip public unions seem to have on govt. services.
And I'm going to fight that as long as the anti-union rhetoric is as out-to-lunch as it is. Teachers salaries aren't the problem, a banking/property collapse and two wars are the problem.
Despite that though I dislike unions and think they're a patch for a broken government.
The problem is that the powers unions need to combat corruption are also useful for keeping lazy workers around. A small price to pay for modern worker safety but still something to be aware of the next time we try to fix things with laws.
Great movie plot, sure. Like we all believed a virus could infect a computer here or there but there's no way anyone accepts the story of a worm owning a network of hundreds of thousands of computers. That's just too far fetched.
You don't understand scriptable attacks. This isn't just possible, it's probable. When a hole is found it'll be used all at once.
And the cost is nice and minimal, until there's - oh let's just say - an intrusion at a cert provider that let the attacker generate 500+ certs, and then a scripted attack hits and drains hundreds of billions before bringing the economy to a standstill for fear of fraud and/or locked accounts.
The problem with security flaws is that their potential cost is usually something like "an order of magnitude larger than our revenue for a decade" or some other absolutely unbearable cost.
I can think of a lot of reasons to want a site shut down quickly.
Can you? This'll be good.
Maybe there's a website spreading naked pictures of me around.
Oh Em Gee! Pictures of a hairless ape without its tribal accoutrements.
Don't pose for pictures you don't want showing up.
Or my children.
As above, so? Or did you mean abusive pictures? In which case we pop by and arrest you for letting it happen. The website still isn't doing anything to anyone though.
Or calling for my murder.
Have you done anything deserving of death? Why is this necessarily a bad thing?
Your (presumably) government is fine with lies and death threats, and have called for murder and invasion under false pretenses on the web, tv, radio, in print, etc. If that's okay I don't see why you deserve special immunity to the threats.
Maybe it's terrorism.
Ohhh, maybe! Like a terrorist website that attempts to blow up other websites. That would require immediate action. Unfortunately, it's also fiction. Try again.
Maybe it's something else.
I think you're onto something here. It pretty much has to be!
Who knows?
Well, I know you don't.
Waiting for a judge to be found to deal with this problem may or may not be worth it. I don't know the judicial situation in the UK, but around here, it can be a bit of a problem.
Oh yeah, your #1 and #2 problems are people seeing photos of naked apes and #4 is unspecified terrorism, like you've got a fucking clue what side is up, let alone what a valid problem might be to warrant skipping judicial oversight, or that you've got a accurate and current idea on the prevalence of this special type of extra-evil website and what the harm from it would be.
You're just another authoritarian fool calling for endless regulations without even trying to understand the issue or the implications.
Yeah, because lower-level employees routinely approach foreign governments and bargain for laws to be changed without the higher-ups noticing.
But whatever. Even if he setup a business where such things were done without his oversight, it doesn't lessen his moral responsibility to watch what his influence is being used to do.
this is just a pretty standard trade deal for IT software. Not illegal, probably not even immoral at all.
Almost certainly immoral, possibly illegal.
How standard it is just speaks to the level of corruption and dishonesty in business, not the inherent rightness.
MS was really selling was the licenses (which don't help Tunisia with it's crackdown at all) and what MS got was Tunisia using less pirated software.
Oh gosh, I didn't know they had business goals. Well shucks then, all's fair if you're trying to make a buck.
Oh, and note the part where all this happened before the trouble, and it was a five-year in the making deal.
Oh, note how the cable (circa 2006) questions the goals of the Tunisian government. Even then their dictatorial activities were well known.
Further, Microsoft was negotiating a government-enforced monopoly. You'd have to be stupid to think that would help the people. They're clearly buying favors from the government that go against the good of the people. They're slime even if there isn't a law against it in this case.
The linked source even says that Microsoft agreed to help train handicapped workers to telecommute so they could get employment. MS: being evil by helping all those damned cripples
The linked source even calls the charity "backroom dealing required to finalize a deal" so we can safely assume (based on other Tunisian leaks) that MS simply kicked back much of the government's purchase price to the ruling family. It's part of how dictators drain their economies into their personal accounts.
Self-signed certs would be an improvement because they wouldn't implicitly promise anything they couldn't deliver.
Also, if we all used self-signed certs we'd know how to check them. The bank would have its cert fingerprint on its business cards. If you called up the receptionist would know what a key fingerprint would be.
The situation was a failure in concept alone, then they picked Verisign to implement it and it went from bad to intentionally criminal. Then they opened it up to everyone and their dog and it didn't change much, it only got cheaper, which is good I guess because snake-oil doesn't need to be expensive.
Actually, no. It'd be yet another act of criminal conspiracy to eliminate witnesses in what is ultimately the largest corrupt organization in the world, the US government and armed forces. An organization guilty of trillion-dollar sweetheart deals, multiple wars on faked evidence causing the killing of millions already this century, violating war crimes laws, etc.
Assuming Manning leaked the documents, it was justified - required actually, by the oath of service but also by general decency.
Evidence of wrong-doing at any level must be brought to the highest, civilian eyes and civilian courts.
Bradley Manning is a hero, and you are a pathetic tool for suggesting otherwise.
I'm glad you take responsibility for the things your nation is doing. Too many of us are pointing at the other guy. Can we send you and GWB to Iraq as a peace offering? "Sorry, mkay?"
I feel that if we as a nation break a law we claim to hold sacred we should either pay up or get rid of the hypocritical law. If we want to go to war on faked evidence we should start allowing murder defendants back home an automatic self-defense defense if they'll provide a doctored photo of the victim with a weapon.
Because that way we'd have some fucking credibility, and when the next thug stood up we'd have real allies instead of lackeys. This way we're stroking a white cat and clutching our doomsday weapons, watching our fancily uniformed soldiers kicking down doors looking for the hero, and never noticing that the camera isn't giving us the favorable angles anymore.
I'll chuckle if you receive the same fate as the innocents whose troubles he reports on.
And yes, last I heard Assange had totally pulled a Khaddafi, that being the decades long enslavement of an entire country and the abuses and murder of tens of thousands.
We pay the RCMP fairly well and four of them tazed a man to death at an airport, apparently just to watch him die.
Then they all took their ID numbers off and beat people in Toronto while enforcing illegal "laws".
How much do we have to pay them so they won't be thugs? Because at this point they've proven that they'd, like Iranian police, kill us rather than protect us.
For example, call a few engineers in the appropriate field and give them the scenario the patent was developed under and remind them of 'A+B+C' - if 'D' if the first thing out of their mouths, it IS obvious.
But, lacking a time machine, how do you show that they're not using hindsight?
You do this at file-time, not trial-time. If they aren't using the patent in question to figure out D, then D must be obvious.
Let's compare countries with patent laws to countries without patent laws... which do better in innovation? Which have higher GDPs? Which have advanced more over the centuries? You can correctly argue that there are tons of other factors involved, and so it's only a correlation, and I'd absolutely agree...
And yet you bring it up anyways because another discussion mired in fallacies is a win for your side. You're the ones making the extraordinary claims - that your policies increase GDP and thus the evidence is yours to provide. Doubly so since you're trying to achieve a positive effect by artificially granting a monopoly, something well known to be inefficient.
But where's even as weak evidence as a mere correlation for the premise that patents stifle innovation? Theory, hypotheticals, and anecdotes are not evidence that this is ridiculous as you assert.
All around you. You're swimming in it! And actually, anecdotes would be evidence in this case.
Engineers are specifically told to avoid seeing (hilariously, even the titles of) patent applications lest their stray glance be used to show their entire company willfully infringed. This alone nearly guarantees the uselessness of patents, at least as we implement them.
Also, patents are frequently used against an inventor by someone who simply proves to be camping on a trivial idea. Cookies made Amazon's one-click ordering inevitable by removing all remaining technical limitations to the process. (An error in a normal shopping cart could make it function in one-click mode.) Now anyone who makes the same UI improvement can be extorted by Amazon unless (perhaps) they've crippled their code enough to avoid the straight-forward way that Amazon used. Worse, if they do try to avoid infringing they're more likely merely liable for further damages.
Without patents the 'worst' that happens is double-invention, and a lower opportunity to sell new processes. Patents enable the almost unthinkable to happen - to be forbidden from using something you created. This failure mode is hideously likely and incredibly damaging, both morally and financially.
An innovative company could keep making useful products for a long time. A patent troll never produces anything. For every unreasonable patent a real developer loses and a troll and their lawyers win. Society only wins as long as short-term paper profit counts.
Slashdot Mirror
A correct and more sensible option would be [...] email addresses of users who registered [...] audit the hardware of the remainder through Steam (and it's already capable of this) [...] a small % of legit owners to track down [...] mailshot every game owner [...] game will be disabled in 10 days [...] proper hardware [...] mailshot again [...] proof of purchase within 30 days or risk a perma ban.
Oh yeah, that sounds like a simple, non-intrusive, and useful plan. What could go wrong?
At this point they're looking at a PR nightmare. One wrong permaban could keep this in gamer news for months, influencing a lot of purchases.
They should go the other way with it. Say that it's too bad some people have to try to spoil things, etc, but that it's important to not let that happen and as such release the game free to all Steam users who have any AMD GPU or CPU without any further checks. That way absolutely nobody would be wrongfully denied and their other Steam-using customers would get a freebie just for having an AMD product.
It should be easy to do. Most of a game's sales come in the first few months. Negotiating a larger giveaway after that spike in sales (if there is one) should be pretty cheap as the publisher is looking to bargain-bin it at that point anyway. It'd probably cost AMD less than other ad campaigns and seeing a company trying to make things right instead of pointing the finger would be a better ad - to me - than more bogus benchmarks.
It's funny, "we" used to point to the USSR, China, North Korea, to prove that Communism didn't work, despite that it was far more likely just that brutal totalitarianism doesn't work (well).
Now people are pointing to "us" as proof that the free market doesn't work which is hilarious because we've never tried it.
The *last* thing Apple, Microsoft, SCO, Oracle, RAMBUS, etc, want is to have a free market where they'd have to compete on merits alone. Apple could do it, but would hate having to get its fingernails dirty actually competing on price. The rest would be dead in a week without our laws providing them passive rent-type income, mostly from the work of others.
And your prickish attitude is why I crack everything I buy. It's bad enough shelling out $60 for a buggy product, but to jump through a bunch of hoops to have some monkey tell me it's defective by design is unbearable.
I bought a Blizzard game (WC2 era) and it wouldn't run because I had a CD burner. I emailed Blizzard and asked for a workaround - they suggested I buy a new CD drive (then $80 or more). I suggested a crack, they told me it'd be illegal, I told them knowingly selling a defective product was illegal... It stalled there.
Now I don't buy a game (a big title with DRM - Indie Bundle stuff is different) until working cracks are available. Especially as I like to replay games (years later, in emulators, under wine, etc) and DRM is ridiculously fragile.
As long as there's a socially-recognized need to provide for censorship
There isn't. But there's always some totalitarian twerp willing to stack the discussion by bringing up statistically nonexistent things, or unpleasant things like kiddy porn that are only a symptom of the still unaddressed actual abuse, and try to use peer pressure to make it look like anyone who wants an uncensored net is really a secret freak or naive.
The only way to make [censorship] work truly fairly, in my opinion
Oh yeah, that's what the world needs, the uninformed opinion of someone whose best idea is limiting speech for great justice.
make it very difficult to censor unless one can provide proof
Oh yeah, so you mean make it trivially easy and give the keys to some bureaucrat who will push the button whenever given a properly signed form?
So yeah, let's just re-architect the internet into a centralized thing, require ID for anything, mandate government-key-escrow style crypto for everything (to remove the need for all other crypto), make all other crypto illegal to allow the scan for things needing censoring, and maintain an huge database of links and content hashes we've marked. Not to mention the hacking target that we've created...
And that doesn't even touch on the bureaucracy inherent in the censoring organization, let along in the auditing process require to be able to recognize and ultimately undo mistaken censoring, etc.
Wow.
Because you're easily led, panicky, and morally outraged by the skin of your own species, you want to break the internet almost entirely, enact a trillion-dollar government boondoggle, then funnel all communications and business through that boondoggle. Or had you not thought of any of the consequences of your desires?
Awesome business strategy. Sell something broken and complain about the childish customers who aren't willing to fix it.
They have an obligation to provide what they said they'd provide. A game isn't anything like "a bunch of hoops involving UPC codes, photos, and ID, then, maybe, a game".
Perhaps, but if they generate them cryptographically (hash random strings to generate more-random keys) there won't be a practical way.
It's (usually) not like it used to be where the keys were just a pattern thing, now your specific key is looked up and if it's not there it doesn't let you in.
You couldn't be dumber with a lobotomy.
Ohhh, good idea. I haven't noticed the problem myself but a lot of people complain about coupon redeemers so they'd probably try a free app to avoid them.
It's got iPhone written all over it.
It sounds fun. Have you written this sort of thing before? Were you serious?
If not I might do a web app of it - scrape Groupon/etc and build a list of what to avoid and when.
Can't do that till we get rid of the grip public unions seem to have on govt. services.
And I'm going to fight that as long as the anti-union rhetoric is as out-to-lunch as it is. Teachers salaries aren't the problem, a banking/property collapse and two wars are the problem.
Despite that though I dislike unions and think they're a patch for a broken government.
The problem is that the powers unions need to combat corruption are also useful for keeping lazy workers around. A small price to pay for modern worker safety but still something to be aware of the next time we try to fix things with laws.
I suggest an airlock-style tiled entryway/shower system and motion-sensor set to discriminate between children and adults by height.
Great movie plot, sure. Like we all believed a virus could infect a computer here or there but there's no way anyone accepts the story of a worm owning a network of hundreds of thousands of computers. That's just too far fetched.
You don't understand scriptable attacks. This isn't just possible, it's probable. When a hole is found it'll be used all at once.
Flash-crash. Get used to it.
And the cost is nice and minimal, until there's - oh let's just say - an intrusion at a cert provider that let the attacker generate 500+ certs, and then a scripted attack hits and drains hundreds of billions before bringing the economy to a standstill for fear of fraud and/or locked accounts.
The problem with security flaws is that their potential cost is usually something like "an order of magnitude larger than our revenue for a decade" or some other absolutely unbearable cost.
I can think of a lot of reasons to want a site shut down quickly.
Can you? This'll be good.
Maybe there's a website spreading naked pictures of me around.
Oh Em Gee! Pictures of a hairless ape without its tribal accoutrements.
Don't pose for pictures you don't want showing up.
Or my children.
As above, so? Or did you mean abusive pictures? In which case we pop by and arrest you for letting it happen. The website still isn't doing anything to anyone though.
Or calling for my murder.
Have you done anything deserving of death? Why is this necessarily a bad thing?
Your (presumably) government is fine with lies and death threats, and have called for murder and invasion under false pretenses on the web, tv, radio, in print, etc. If that's okay I don't see why you deserve special immunity to the threats.
Maybe it's terrorism.
Ohhh, maybe! Like a terrorist website that attempts to blow up other websites. That would require immediate action. Unfortunately, it's also fiction. Try again.
Maybe it's something else.
I think you're onto something here. It pretty much has to be!
Who knows?
Well, I know you don't.
Waiting for a judge to be found to deal with this problem may or may not be worth it. I don't know the judicial situation in the UK, but around here, it can be a bit of a problem.
Oh yeah, your #1 and #2 problems are people seeing photos of naked apes and #4 is unspecified terrorism, like you've got a fucking clue what side is up, let alone what a valid problem might be to warrant skipping judicial oversight, or that you've got a accurate and current idea on the prevalence of this special type of extra-evil website and what the harm from it would be.
You're just another authoritarian fool calling for endless regulations without even trying to understand the issue or the implications.
Yeah, because lower-level employees routinely approach foreign governments and bargain for laws to be changed without the higher-ups noticing.
But whatever. Even if he setup a business where such things were done without his oversight, it doesn't lessen his moral responsibility to watch what his influence is being used to do.
this is just a pretty standard trade deal for IT software. Not illegal, probably not even immoral at all.
Almost certainly immoral, possibly illegal.
How standard it is just speaks to the level of corruption and dishonesty in business, not the inherent rightness.
MS was really selling was the licenses (which don't help Tunisia with it's crackdown at all) and what MS got was Tunisia using less pirated software.
Oh gosh, I didn't know they had business goals. Well shucks then, all's fair if you're trying to make a buck.
Oh, and note the part where all this happened before the trouble, and it was a five-year in the making deal.
Oh, note how the cable (circa 2006) questions the goals of the Tunisian government. Even then their dictatorial activities were well known.
Further, Microsoft was negotiating a government-enforced monopoly. You'd have to be stupid to think that would help the people. They're clearly buying favors from the government that go against the good of the people. They're slime even if there isn't a law against it in this case.
The linked source even says that Microsoft agreed to help train handicapped workers to telecommute so they could get employment. MS: being evil by helping all those damned cripples
The linked source even calls the charity "backroom dealing required to finalize a deal" so we can safely assume (based on other Tunisian leaks) that MS simply kicked back much of the government's purchase price to the ruling family. It's part of how dictators drain their economies into their personal accounts.
Self-signed certs would be an improvement because they wouldn't implicitly promise anything they couldn't deliver.
Also, if we all used self-signed certs we'd know how to check them. The bank would have its cert fingerprint on its business cards. If you called up the receptionist would know what a key fingerprint would be.
The situation was a failure in concept alone, then they picked Verisign to implement it and it went from bad to intentionally criminal. Then they opened it up to everyone and their dog and it didn't change much, it only got cheaper, which is good I guess because snake-oil doesn't need to be expensive.
What does the supervision actually make better, for me and the common people?
Nothing. Yeah, imagine that.
Bullshit. People will live because of these leaks.
Yeah, you'd better take credit for coining that. Next thing you know it'll be everywhere and you'll be famous for being such an insightful wordsmith.
You're still an authoritarian tool though.
Actually, no. It'd be yet another act of criminal conspiracy to eliminate witnesses in what is ultimately the largest corrupt organization in the world, the US government and armed forces. An organization guilty of trillion-dollar sweetheart deals, multiple wars on faked evidence causing the killing of millions already this century, violating war crimes laws, etc.
Assuming Manning leaked the documents, it was justified - required actually, by the oath of service but also by general decency.
Evidence of wrong-doing at any level must be brought to the highest, civilian eyes and civilian courts.
Bradley Manning is a hero, and you are a pathetic tool for suggesting otherwise.
I'm glad you take responsibility for the things your nation is doing. Too many of us are pointing at the other guy. Can we send you and GWB to Iraq as a peace offering? "Sorry, mkay?"
I feel that if we as a nation break a law we claim to hold sacred we should either pay up or get rid of the hypocritical law. If we want to go to war on faked evidence we should start allowing murder defendants back home an automatic self-defense defense if they'll provide a doctored photo of the victim with a weapon.
Because that way we'd have some fucking credibility, and when the next thug stood up we'd have real allies instead of lackeys. This way we're stroking a white cat and clutching our doomsday weapons, watching our fancily uniformed soldiers kicking down doors looking for the hero, and never noticing that the camera isn't giving us the favorable angles anymore.
I'll chuckle if you receive the same fate as the innocents whose troubles he reports on.
And yes, last I heard Assange had totally pulled a Khaddafi, that being the decades long enslavement of an entire country and the abuses and murder of tens of thousands.
You fucking authoritarian tool. Go choke.
We pay the RCMP fairly well and four of them tazed a man to death at an airport, apparently just to watch him die.
Then they all took their ID numbers off and beat people in Toronto while enforcing illegal "laws".
How much do we have to pay them so they won't be thugs? Because at this point they've proven that they'd, like Iranian police, kill us rather than protect us.
For all the cries of circlejerk there are a lot of whiny "you nerds hurt my feelings" posts by people who apparently are above the whole thing.
If you really don't like it here, please don't ever come back. Go away. But of course, you're a troll so we're "blessed" with you.
For example, call a few engineers in the appropriate field and give them the scenario the patent was developed under and remind them of 'A+B+C' - if 'D' if the first thing out of their mouths, it IS obvious.
But, lacking a time machine, how do you show that they're not using hindsight?
You do this at file-time, not trial-time. If they aren't using the patent in question to figure out D, then D must be obvious.
Let's compare countries with patent laws to countries without patent laws... which do better in innovation? Which have higher GDPs? Which have advanced more over the centuries? You can correctly argue that there are tons of other factors involved, and so it's only a correlation, and I'd absolutely agree...
And yet you bring it up anyways because another discussion mired in fallacies is a win for your side. You're the ones making the extraordinary claims - that your policies increase GDP and thus the evidence is yours to provide. Doubly so since you're trying to achieve a positive effect by artificially granting a monopoly, something well known to be inefficient.
But where's even as weak evidence as a mere correlation for the premise that patents stifle innovation? Theory, hypotheticals, and anecdotes are not evidence that this is ridiculous as you assert.
All around you. You're swimming in it! And actually, anecdotes would be evidence in this case.
Engineers are specifically told to avoid seeing (hilariously, even the titles of) patent applications lest their stray glance be used to show their entire company willfully infringed. This alone nearly guarantees the uselessness of patents, at least as we implement them.
Also, patents are frequently used against an inventor by someone who simply proves to be camping on a trivial idea. Cookies made Amazon's one-click ordering inevitable by removing all remaining technical limitations to the process. (An error in a normal shopping cart could make it function in one-click mode.) Now anyone who makes the same UI improvement can be extorted by Amazon unless (perhaps) they've crippled their code enough to avoid the straight-forward way that Amazon used. Worse, if they do try to avoid infringing they're more likely merely liable for further damages.
Without patents the 'worst' that happens is double-invention, and a lower opportunity to sell new processes. Patents enable the almost unthinkable to happen - to be forbidden from using something you created. This failure mode is hideously likely and incredibly damaging, both morally and financially.
An innovative company could keep making useful products for a long time. A patent troll never produces anything. For every unreasonable patent a real developer loses and a troll and their lawyers win. Society only wins as long as short-term paper profit counts.