Your metrics are the percentage of patents asserted and how many make it to trial? You don't even consider the amount of settlements that happened for obvious universal technologies, or perhaps more importantly the number of uses of a patent to implement something useful which could not have been developed independently.
You're asking to assume patents are useful until proven otherwise, and waving your hands about cherry-picking, when in fact you'd have to cherry-pick pretty severely to find an example of a software patent which would stand up to an honest evaluation of its novelty. This is because software is not created by lone inventors having eureka moments behind closed doors—the state of the art is pushed forward primarily through massive collaboration. The vast majority of software patents only exist because software and mathematics are arcane topics that the patent office doesn't have the expertise to understand or the incentive to evaluate honestly.
Software patents and IP are not natural laws with inherent value. It is not for us to empirically prove their harm, rather they are specific legal constructs designed for the public good, and thus their good must be justified, not the other way around.
You're asking to assume patents are useful until proven otherwise, and waving your hands about cherry-picking, when in fact you'd have to cherry-pick pretty severely to find an example of a software patent which would stand up to an honest evaluation of its novelty. This is because software is not created by lone inventors having eureka moments behind closed doors—the state of the art is pushed forward primarily through massive collaboration. The vast majority of software patents only exist because software and mathematics are arcane topics that the patent office doesn't have the expertise to understand or the incentive to evaluate honestly.
Software patents and IP are not natural laws with inherent value. It is not for us to empirically prove their harm, rather they are specific legal constructs designed for the public good, and thus their good must be justified, not the other way around.