Lawrence Rosen writes:
 > I'll be blunt about it: If we didn't have copyright on software and only had
 > patents, we'd be much better off.

As a hypothetical, it's great, however you are presuming that bad
patents aren't granted.  You admonish us not to ignore the reality of
software patents.  Well, the reality is that 99% of them are invalid.

Speaking of patents, I uploaded x86 assembly code which implements
something compatible with MacPaint, to code.google.com.  It's called
"Painter's Apprentive".  The code is 20 years old, which means that
it's a great source of prior art for graphics algorithms.

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