"You do realize that companies who develop medicines depend on patents to guarantee that it cannot be copied so they can make more money and make more medicines right?"
The vast majority, more than 80%, of the patent generated revenues in the pharm industry does not go to R&D. It goes to marketing, administration and comparatively horridly inefficient production. Take a look at any pharmaceuticals financial reports some time.
You do realize that we'd get five times the current amount of R&D if we simply paid for it outright? Or the same amount of R&D for a fifth of the cost? And that's being generous and not counting the likelyhood that a large part of the R&D is comparatively inefficient due to decades of monopoly protection.
You do realize that state-granted monopoly rights is one of the most inefficient ways to generate financial incentives conceivable?
The cost savings on throwing together your own parts are, like you say, barely worth it.
However, once you get two or three generations of your own built computers, standardize on specific component types and have half a dozen machines, a whole new series of benefits start materializing. At that point you have replacement parts for more or less everything, you can merge hardware when it's getting old and replaced, new components give you cascade upgrades throughout all your systems and you get a fair amount of experience with what can go wrong with the hardware and drivers.
I used to buy preassembled brand-name computers, because they usually cost me less as a whole, but for the cheap systems they tended to be the worst of the worst, componentwise, and once they got older they were difficult to upgrade and had proprietary issues.
Yeah, when I did, I did do administrative and maintenance overhead too, but those numbers can vary a lot depending on setup on both the tape and online storage side, of course. I suspect we're talking around eachother a bit tho. The case I was going over was something like weekly full backups plus incrementals, keep approximately four cycles, archiving handled separately for the specific systems that need it. Very much a 'backup-only' solution, not a permanent archive solution.
"Are you planning on adding 200GB/month of NAS/SAN storage space each month ?"
In such a setup I'd basically add online backup storage in sync with online primary storage growth. That's actually one of the advantages; primary and backup storage using the same technology means they naturally grow together, and you dont suffer from the disjointed jumps in media capacity during system migrations.
"Remember historical data is important."
Historical data is, indeed, important, but often also tends to be comparatively small. Of course, that depends on your organization, you might be subject to specific backup and archiving scheduling requirements that makes tape far more attractive; compare, the breakeven point if you have a complete archive of all enterprise storage every month, stored ten years will be far different from if you keep one copy of material permanently available, with backups for redundancy, and just archive the financial data.
I'd have to disagree. Like you say, tapes break down too, and rampant storage growth means you'll have to upgrade, and hence migrate everything, to the next storage medium in quite probably less than those 5 years anyway. And if you already have to migrate and refresh everything in less than the expected lifetime of the medium, then lifetime isnt such an important factor.
Last time I went over the calculation you'd be better and cheaper off with online multiple redundancy backup to live disk. Yes, disks break down, but that's why raid was invented...
Compared with that, IIRC, the break even point for tape was around several dozens of terabytes of data; you'd have to be a fairly large enterprise for tape to be the best option these days.
As a major and growing drain on economic resources a fair case can be made for intellectual property as a substantial harm. The actual problem is not that you are prevented from watching the "Sound of Music", but rather lies in the diversion of resources from the free market into inefficient monopolies. Resources which would otherwise have been better utilized.
As an indication of the long term effects of monopoly inefficiencies, take a look at, and compare the economic development in economies allowing competition, versus, for example, communist economies. Then consider how much further developed the intellectual monopoly fields would be today, were it not for the monopoly legislation.
How much more music would we have available, if the resources spent actually went to the creation of music? How many more diseases would we have cured, were not 80% of the money spent on medicines wasted on monopoly protected marketing and administration, rather than R&D?
The easily visible part is only the least of the harm caused by intellectual monopoly legislation. The greatest harm is all that that goes uncreated and uninvented because those resources are spent on anti-competetive monopolies.
"Not unless there are some very real advantages and multiple of them."
Frankly, the only way I can see it working would be as a modular system. Sure, if I could have a 'laptop system core' the size of a PDA with similar power consumption, with only enough storage for OS, basic apps and data, which could easily and reliably be extended with other storage depending on occasion. Self-contained bluetooth/wifi enabled disks, with their own batteries? Personal-space attached storage?
It's getting high time for a serious shakeup in the whole pda/laptop/phone/camera/media player field. I want a plug'n'play system, not carry around five devices with overlapping functionality that suck in different ways.
I dont think you get the level at which these people work. Separating systems and access between functional groups is normal. The kind of people writing the book in question want separation for each and every activity done. If you were a Unix admin, not only would you not have access to the database, you wouldn't even have access to the database files, nor the commands to modify the volumes. You couldnt be allowed access to a compiler, nor sudo access to, for example, vi or more (as they contain a shell escapes). Do you really need to access/dev? Maybe not every day, better make it conditional. These people think web access, email and Ipods ought to be restricted, so forget about downloading patches and reading security bulletins.
Needless to say, any company operating on such principles will become more or less entirely uncompetetive as they implode under the weight of internal administrative overhead and distrust.
As the grandparent considered the issues of free downloading, intellectual property law and region issues to be completely different, it needed to be pointed out that they're not. They're the same, and have the same root issue; should, or should we not, allow the method of monopoly control to steer market prices within certain sectors.
Personally, I agree completely with you, the intellectual monopoly laws need to be torn up and rewritten from scratch to function and allow market pricing within the modern day free market economy. If we need any particular incentive for innovation and creativity above the incentive of being better/faster/a step ahead of the competition, and if we need any particular incentive for investment in those areas, it should not take the form of protected monopoly rights.
Monopoly pricing is optimized and set by setting price relative to available disposable capital (consumers can choose to buy or not buy the product, as opposed to a free market where they can choose to buy from one producer or buy from their cheaper competitor). Disposable income varies between regions, therefore the corporations need to be able to vary price between regions and prevent paralell imports or they will be unable to maximize income in one region or unable to sell at all in another.
'The practice should be illegal not sanctioned and protected.'
The practice is a natural byproduct of intellectual monopoly law. They're intricately linked, and you see similar practices in everything ranging from medicines to clothes. The only way to get rid of regionality pricing issues is to deal with the fundamental market problem underlying them and create a more appropriate method of encouraging investment in such areas of endeavour.
"A high powered solar lamp can help you here will alleviate many many symptoms."
In fact, as compact flourescent bulbs are now available fairly cheap, just changing most of your lights to high output 20+W CF bulbs can make a difference. The difference between 'I can see well enough to read' and 'almost bright enough to grow tomatoes inside' is noticeable for me at least.
"most people appear to be having a good time."
Mmm. Appear. Heh. Frankly, I'm starting to have trouble finding anyone who doesnt actually more or less hate the season. Maybe it's just the people I know, or maybe it's the more stressful life these days, but the extra strain of the holidays appears to kick most people over the healthy-stress level into the about-to-go-ballistic level.
Of course it's bullshit. And, even if such a figure was anywhere near reality, as that money is instead spent elsewhere, and quite probably on something vastly more worthwhile than financing media marketingblitzes and coke parties for hollywood execs, it would be a net gain for the economy and something to cheer about.
Probably not, the similarities in prices are quite likely also due to the monopoly pricing status inherent in 'intellectual property'. As nobody else can sell a replacement product you can set your price at the maximum the market will bear. That is a more or less fixed competition for a certain subset of the disposable income of the consumers, which results in prices simply rising as disposable income rises, and as everyone sets their prices the same way - at which point do our customers do without - instead of - at which points can our competitors undercut us, it will look like price fixing, but you cant correct the problem until you remove the laws granting monopoly status for the products.
Actually it's common enough to even have its own economic term; it's called rent-seeking, the concept of lobbying politicians or others to give you money without risking an investment or working for it, something a free market economy would otherwise require you to do.
As the entire 'intellectual property' is based around laws circumventing competition, it's not surprising they're often involved in such behaviour.
When you can take a product costing about $20k to produce, selling platinum at a $12+ price, and _fail_ to make a profit, I'm sorry, but you've squandered all your chances and you deserve to get darwinized by the market.
The labels add no value anymore, they only add cost. Something neither the consumers, nor the artists, gain from.
Less desireable music and the net gives everyone easier access to independent artists.
And above all; why the hell should I give my money to fascists lobbying the governments worldwide to strip away my rights?
Any temporary desire I might have to purchase, or even listen to, a song is rapidly replaced with disgust if I find any connections to the industry. And these days I check before I buy.
"However it could explain human ritual and dogma."
Not only ritual and dogma, but the inherent desire to accumulate knowledge by imitation explains social evolution. After all, strip away all the knowledge of our predecessors and we'd be foraging in the jungle, trying to compete with the chimps.
A whole lifetime of brilliant experimentation takes you only so far if every generation starts out trying to figure out how to open a coconut with a rock.
Yep, and people hate that enough to pay for relatively expensive dedicated time-shifting equipment. Equipment which is more or less technically trivial to get to load its data over to a handheld device within the near future horizon. Which has the additional advantage of being cheaper _and_ more desireable than broadcast programming on a cellphone.
The choice of bandwidth isnt the only thing that's odd. The whole business plan is odd, as is the very idea that they'll be able to convert portable TV into any kind of sizeable revenue stream when they'll be forced to compete with portable free video. Or, well, it's odd until you realize the business plans are probably written by the same people who wrote most of the dot-com plans.
One: Someone with a doctorate of classical greek literature may know more about general greek literature, if queried on the spot, than someone who's just read three or four recent research articles about the Illiad. However, someone just summing up those three or four research articles in a wikipedia entry will probably do as good a job summing up those articles, as long as it's attributed and cites those research papers.
You're confusing original research with information collection, summation and writing. They're different skills, and using one when you need the other gives you no significant improvement and is just a waste of someones time, effort and resources. The doctorate guy would be spending his time better writing researching and writing a paper in his specialization.
Two: Editors just provide a feel-good fuzzy feeling beyond a certain level. Having editors tag 'editions' might be possible and is already done to some extent, but if you're going to give someone the specific job to lock and approve articles, you might as well give them the job of actually writing the article, because they need to do the same fact checking anyway. And if you're going to give them the job of writing the articles, you're going to need a whole lot of them. And if you're going to need a whole lot of them, you get the community size problem of a wiki to keep up with the changes. And you're back at square one.
Three: This is already done.
"The Register article was not a troll."
Walks like a troll, quacks like a troll...
The commentary regarding trusting sources is inane at best. The very idea that you should be able to take anything you read at face value is a naive fantasy, and counterindicated by the very scientific principles he professes such respect for.
Everything you read _is_ suspect. If you think otherwise I've got a great timeshare/bridge/cellphone plan/war to sell you, and I'm going to be laughing all the way to the bank. The information landscape is, and always has been, open to manipulation by anyone who wants to manipulate it. The wikipedia just formalizes that.
The whole problem with 'perfect security' is that it encourages design without graceful modes of failure.
When you know you have shitty security, and you know you that it's more or less practically impossible to get better than moderately shitty security, you design the whole 'system' with those factors in mind.
Wether in computer systems or social, economic and physical systems this can take various forms, ranging from not pissing people off more than you have to, through not keeping as many valuable/important things in one place, to designing for redundancy.
Once you start thinking you're 'secure', or even start thinking you can ever get 'secure', you'll feel like you dont have to design for graceful failure, and you'll get horrendously burned.
"Monopolies are bad for capitalism and monopolies are bad for consumers."
Unfortunately, patents are in themselves monopolies, so...
Microsofts monopolistic practices damage the economy, but so do patents monopolistic nature, so either way the economy is damaged. It's a fight over who gets to screw us all, we all get to pay for it, as the resources spent on the fight are permanently lost to the wealth of the economy, and we all get to pay again for the above-market monopoly pricing, no matter who wins in this case.
"The notion that copyright infringement damages the prospects of companies that write software and therefore the employment prospects of programmers (oops, there's my conflict of interest) strikes me as perfectly reasonable."
Except of course, it ignores the fact that the money going to pay for the software is now taken from something something else instead, leading to a net loss in the economy.
It's similar to the broken windows fallacy, and fails to take into account the effect on the entire economic system.
"We shouldn't discount the opinions of experts just because they have an interest in their field."
Of course not, what I'm pointing out is that a patent lawyers actual field of expertize in this case is only the slim facet of application of patent law within the current legal framework.
The discussion about wether the current legal framework of patent law is beneficial or not is largely centered outside the field in question.
As a paralell, you might ask a computer programmer to write a smart-house control program for you, you might ask a programmer if it's feasible to write such a program, but they might not necessarily the best person to ask wether or not you actually need a smart-house system, especially if you put them in a difficult ethical situation by offering them the opportunity to be the implementor if they say you need it...
A patent lawyer can most certainly input useful commentary, especially about the technical aspects of the current system, but unless they also hold degrees in various other disciplines, or can cite research or arguments based in those disciplines, their knowledge may not necessarily be particularly applicable to the actual subject.
There are a couple of issues you'll have to consider too; as the recording industry sets prices from their position of monopoly supplier of each specific product they are already exacting more or less the maximum available amount of capital from their market. Increase the variety and they compete with their own products for more or less the same money, so increased variety is not necessarily in their interest.
Slashdot Mirror
"You do realize that companies who develop medicines depend on patents to guarantee that it cannot be copied so they can make more money and make more medicines right?"
The vast majority, more than 80%, of the patent generated revenues in the pharm industry does not go to R&D. It goes to marketing, administration and comparatively horridly inefficient production. Take a look at any pharmaceuticals financial reports some time.
You do realize that we'd get five times the current amount of R&D if we simply paid for it outright? Or the same amount of R&D for a fifth of the cost? And that's being generous and not counting the likelyhood that a large part of the R&D is comparatively inefficient due to decades of monopoly protection.
You do realize that state-granted monopoly rights is one of the most inefficient ways to generate financial incentives conceivable?
The cost savings on throwing together your own parts are, like you say, barely worth it.
However, once you get two or three generations of your own built computers, standardize on specific component types and have half a dozen machines, a whole new series of benefits start materializing. At that point you have replacement parts for more or less everything, you can merge hardware when it's getting old and replaced, new components give you cascade upgrades throughout all your systems and you get a fair amount of experience with what can go wrong with the hardware and drivers.
I used to buy preassembled brand-name computers, because they usually cost me less as a whole, but for the cheap systems they tended to be the worst of the worst, componentwise, and once they got older they were difficult to upgrade and had proprietary issues.
Yeah, when I did, I did do administrative and maintenance overhead too, but those numbers can vary a lot depending on setup on both the tape and online storage side, of course. I suspect we're talking around eachother a bit tho. The case I was going over was something like weekly full backups plus incrementals, keep approximately four cycles, archiving handled separately for the specific systems that need it. Very much a 'backup-only' solution, not a permanent archive solution.
"Are you planning on adding 200GB/month of NAS/SAN storage space each month ?"
In such a setup I'd basically add online backup storage in sync with online primary storage growth. That's actually one of the advantages; primary and backup storage using the same technology means they naturally grow together, and you dont suffer from the disjointed jumps in media capacity during system migrations.
"Remember historical data is important."
Historical data is, indeed, important, but often also tends to be comparatively small. Of course, that depends on your organization, you might be subject to specific backup and archiving scheduling requirements that makes tape far more attractive; compare, the breakeven point if you have a complete archive of all enterprise storage every month, stored ten years will be far different from if you keep one copy of material permanently available, with backups for redundancy, and just archive the financial data.
"All in all, tape is the way to go, "
I'd have to disagree. Like you say, tapes break down too, and rampant storage growth means you'll have to upgrade, and hence migrate everything, to the next storage medium in quite probably less than those 5 years anyway. And if you already have to migrate and refresh everything in less than the expected lifetime of the medium, then lifetime isnt such an important factor.
Last time I went over the calculation you'd be better and cheaper off with online multiple redundancy backup to live disk. Yes, disks break down, but that's why raid was invented...
Compared with that, IIRC, the break even point for tape was around several dozens of terabytes of data; you'd have to be a fairly large enterprise for tape to be the best option these days.
As a major and growing drain on economic resources a fair case can be made for intellectual property as a substantial harm. The actual problem is not that you are prevented from watching the "Sound of Music", but rather lies in the diversion of resources from the free market into inefficient monopolies. Resources which would otherwise have been better utilized.
As an indication of the long term effects of monopoly inefficiencies, take a look at, and compare the economic development in economies allowing competition, versus, for example, communist economies. Then consider how much further developed the intellectual monopoly fields would be today, were it not for the monopoly legislation.
How much more music would we have available, if the resources spent actually went to the creation of music? How many more diseases would we have cured, were not 80% of the money spent on medicines wasted on monopoly protected marketing and administration, rather than R&D?
The easily visible part is only the least of the harm caused by intellectual monopoly legislation. The greatest harm is all that that goes uncreated and uninvented because those resources are spent on anti-competetive monopolies.
"Not unless there are some very real advantages and multiple of them."
Frankly, the only way I can see it working would be as a modular system. Sure, if I could have a 'laptop system core' the size of a PDA with similar power consumption, with only enough storage for OS, basic apps and data, which could easily and reliably be extended with other storage depending on occasion. Self-contained bluetooth/wifi enabled disks, with their own batteries? Personal-space attached storage?
It's getting high time for a serious shakeup in the whole pda/laptop/phone/camera/media player field. I want a plug'n'play system, not carry around five devices with overlapping functionality that suck in different ways.
I dont think you get the level at which these people work. Separating systems and access between functional groups is normal. The kind of people writing the book in question want separation for each and every activity done. If you were a Unix admin, not only would you not have access to the database, you wouldn't even have access to the database files, nor the commands to modify the volumes. You couldnt be allowed access to a compiler, nor sudo access to, for example, vi or more (as they contain a shell escapes). Do you really need to access /dev? Maybe not every day, better make it conditional. These people think web access, email and Ipods ought to be restricted, so forget about downloading patches and reading security bulletins.
Needless to say, any company operating on such principles will become more or less entirely uncompetetive as they implode under the weight of internal administrative overhead and distrust.
As the grandparent considered the issues of free downloading, intellectual property law and region issues to be completely different, it needed to be pointed out that they're not. They're the same, and have the same root issue; should, or should we not, allow the method of monopoly control to steer market prices within certain sectors.
Personally, I agree completely with you, the intellectual monopoly laws need to be torn up and rewritten from scratch to function and allow market pricing within the modern day free market economy. If we need any particular incentive for innovation and creativity above the incentive of being better/faster/a step ahead of the competition, and if we need any particular incentive for investment in those areas, it should not take the form of protected monopoly rights.
Monopoly pricing is optimized and set by setting price relative to available disposable capital (consumers can choose to buy or not buy the product, as opposed to a free market where they can choose to buy from one producer or buy from their cheaper competitor). Disposable income varies between regions, therefore the corporations need to be able to vary price between regions and prevent paralell imports or they will be unable to maximize income in one region or unable to sell at all in another.
'The practice should be illegal not sanctioned and protected.'
The practice is a natural byproduct of intellectual monopoly law. They're intricately linked, and you see similar practices in everything ranging from medicines to clothes. The only way to get rid of regionality pricing issues is to deal with the fundamental market problem underlying them and create a more appropriate method of encouraging investment in such areas of endeavour.
"A high powered solar lamp can help you here will alleviate many many symptoms."
In fact, as compact flourescent bulbs are now available fairly cheap, just changing most of your lights to high output 20+W CF bulbs can make a difference. The difference between 'I can see well enough to read' and 'almost bright enough to grow tomatoes inside' is noticeable for me at least.
"most people appear to be having a good time."
Mmm. Appear. Heh. Frankly, I'm starting to have trouble finding anyone who doesnt actually more or less hate the season. Maybe it's just the people I know, or maybe it's the more stressful life these days, but the extra strain of the holidays appears to kick most people over the healthy-stress level into the about-to-go-ballistic level.
Of course it's bullshit. And, even if such a figure was anywhere near reality, as that money is instead spent elsewhere, and quite probably on something vastly more worthwhile than financing media marketingblitzes and coke parties for hollywood execs, it would be a net gain for the economy and something to cheer about.
"This crap would have stopped a long time ago"
Probably not, the similarities in prices are quite likely also due to the monopoly pricing status inherent in 'intellectual property'. As nobody else can sell a replacement product you can set your price at the maximum the market will bear. That is a more or less fixed competition for a certain subset of the disposable income of the consumers, which results in prices simply rising as disposable income rises, and as everyone sets their prices the same way - at which point do our customers do without - instead of - at which points can our competitors undercut us, it will look like price fixing, but you cant correct the problem until you remove the laws granting monopoly status for the products.
Actually it's common enough to even have its own economic term; it's called rent-seeking, the concept of lobbying politicians or others to give you money without risking an investment or working for it, something a free market economy would otherwise require you to do.
As the entire 'intellectual property' is based around laws circumventing competition, it's not surprising they're often involved in such behaviour.
"and deserve the chance to make a profit"
When you can take a product costing about $20k to produce, selling platinum at a $12+ price, and _fail_ to make a profit, I'm sorry, but you've squandered all your chances and you deserve to get darwinized by the market.
The labels add no value anymore, they only add cost. Something neither the consumers, nor the artists, gain from.
Less desireable music and the net gives everyone easier access to independent artists.
And above all; why the hell should I give my money to fascists lobbying the governments worldwide to strip away my rights?
Any temporary desire I might have to purchase, or even listen to, a song is rapidly replaced with disgust if I find any connections to the industry. And these days I check before I buy.
"However it could explain human ritual and dogma."
Not only ritual and dogma, but the inherent desire to accumulate knowledge by imitation explains social evolution. After all, strip away all the knowledge of our predecessors and we'd be foraging in the jungle, trying to compete with the chimps.
A whole lifetime of brilliant experimentation takes you only so far if every generation starts out trying to figure out how to open a coconut with a rock.
"TV is inherently a broadcast medium"
Yep, and people hate that enough to pay for relatively expensive dedicated time-shifting equipment. Equipment which is more or less technically trivial to get to load its data over to a handheld device within the near future horizon. Which has the additional advantage of being cheaper _and_ more desireable than broadcast programming on a cellphone.
The choice of bandwidth isnt the only thing that's odd. The whole business plan is odd, as is the very idea that they'll be able to convert portable TV into any kind of sizeable revenue stream when they'll be forced to compete with portable free video. Or, well, it's odd until you realize the business plans are probably written by the same people who wrote most of the dot-com plans.
One: Someone with a doctorate of classical greek literature may know more about general greek literature, if queried on the spot, than someone who's just read three or four recent research articles about the Illiad. However, someone just summing up those three or four research articles in a wikipedia entry will probably do as good a job summing up those articles, as long as it's attributed and cites those research papers.
You're confusing original research with information collection, summation and writing. They're different skills, and using one when you need the other gives you no significant improvement and is just a waste of someones time, effort and resources. The doctorate guy would be spending his time better writing researching and writing a paper in his specialization.
Two: Editors just provide a feel-good fuzzy feeling beyond a certain level. Having editors tag 'editions' might be possible and is already done to some extent, but if you're going to give someone the specific job to lock and approve articles, you might as well give them the job of actually writing the article, because they need to do the same fact checking anyway. And if you're going to give them the job of writing the articles, you're going to need a whole lot of them. And if you're going to need a whole lot of them, you get the community size problem of a wiki to keep up with the changes. And you're back at square one.
Three: This is already done.
"The Register article was not a troll."
Walks like a troll, quacks like a troll...
The commentary regarding trusting sources is inane at best. The very idea that you should be able to take anything you read at face value is a naive fantasy, and counterindicated by the very scientific principles he professes such respect for.
Everything you read _is_ suspect. If you think otherwise I've got a great timeshare/bridge/cellphone plan/war to sell you, and I'm going to be laughing all the way to the bank. The information landscape is, and always has been, open to manipulation by anyone who wants to manipulate it. The wikipedia just formalizes that.
You're hitting the problem exact spot-on.
The whole problem with 'perfect security' is that it encourages design without graceful modes of failure.
When you know you have shitty security, and you know you that it's more or less practically impossible to get better than moderately shitty security, you design the whole 'system' with those factors in mind.
Wether in computer systems or social, economic and physical systems this can take various forms, ranging from not pissing people off more than you have to, through not keeping as many valuable/important things in one place, to designing for redundancy.
Once you start thinking you're 'secure', or even start thinking you can ever get 'secure', you'll feel like you dont have to design for graceful failure, and you'll get horrendously burned.
"Monopolies are bad for capitalism and monopolies are bad for consumers."
Unfortunately, patents are in themselves monopolies, so...
Microsofts monopolistic practices damage the economy, but so do patents monopolistic nature, so either way the economy is damaged. It's a fight over who gets to screw us all, we all get to pay for it, as the resources spent on the fight are permanently lost to the wealth of the economy, and we all get to pay again for the above-market monopoly pricing, no matter who wins in this case.
And that, my friend, really, _really_ sucks.
Heh, that should teach me about being lazy and not linking to concepts :). It sounds like we are very much in agreement, yes.
"The notion that copyright infringement damages the prospects of companies that write software and therefore the employment prospects of programmers (oops, there's my conflict of interest) strikes me as perfectly reasonable."
Except of course, it ignores the fact that the money going to pay for the software is now taken from something something else instead, leading to a net loss in the economy.
It's similar to the broken windows fallacy, and fails to take into account the effect on the entire economic system.
"anecdotal evidence isn't sufficiently indicitive of systematic failure."
As a state-protected monopoly grant in a free market economy the patent system is inherently a systematic failure.
Unless, of course, you want to make the argument that competition is bad for the economy...
"We shouldn't discount the opinions of experts just because they have an interest in their field."
Of course not, what I'm pointing out is that a patent lawyers actual field of expertize in this case is only the slim facet of application of patent law within the current legal framework.
The discussion about wether the current legal framework of patent law is beneficial or not is largely centered outside the field in question.
As a paralell, you might ask a computer programmer to write a smart-house control program for you, you might ask a programmer if it's feasible to write such a program, but they might not necessarily the best person to ask wether or not you actually need a smart-house system, especially if you put them in a difficult ethical situation by offering them the opportunity to be the implementor if they say you need it...
A patent lawyer can most certainly input useful commentary, especially about the technical aspects of the current system, but unless they also hold degrees in various other disciplines, or can cite research or arguments based in those disciplines, their knowledge may not necessarily be particularly applicable to the actual subject.
There are a couple of issues you'll have to consider too; as the recording industry sets prices from their position of monopoly supplier of each specific product they are already exacting more or less the maximum available amount of capital from their market. Increase the variety and they compete with their own products for more or less the same money, so increased variety is not necessarily in their interest.