their definition of "dumb" is probably quite different from yours (or most software engineers).
I think many smart patent lawyers are ultimately legal realists here - they have their own philosophical views, but their job involves working in the real system.
Wrong. The people who live under the law are equally well qualified to judge that.
Not the parent, but: in that case you and I agree to disagree: any weird encryption algorithm is the usage of mathematics which should not be patentable in my opinion.
The simplest solution in my mind is simply abolishing patents. Just as e.g. the COVID vaccines were developed using public funds, there is enough ‘protection’ in things like trade secrets (‘recipe of coca cola’) or copyright/-left (‘GPL’ or ‘iOS’) to keep us innovative enough.
I think you are looking at the abolition of patents from a very "software" perspective. Copyleft license terms have basically never been tested in court, and could just be unenforceable, but the tradition of software engineering seems to keep the peace there - GPL'ed and other open source hardware (which frequently has copyleft licensing) frequently gets ripped off without credit and nobody does anything about it. These would have bad facts in a court case, since the copyright doesn't cover the thing, just the schematics.
Trade secrets also generally don't protect you when your product is easy to reverse-engineer and you have customers or competitors with a lot of money to do it. A drug is a prime example of this.
