Lundberg's argument becomes even less plausible when we remember that hundreds of thousands of firms outside the traditional software industry produce custom software for their own use. For example, the Atlantic, like many other online publications, uses a lightly modified version of an open-source software package called Moveable Type to manage its website. Did the Atlantic hire a patent lawyer to inspect its Moveable Type installation and license any relevant patents? I'm sure they didn't, but in principle they're just as vulnerable to patent lawsuits as a traditional software company would be. For example, the Green Bay Packers, Caterpillar, Peapod, OfficeMax, and Kraft Foods were all hit with a patent infringement lawsuit for having JPEG images on their websites.

So why is Lundberg so oblivious to the realities of the software industry? Julian wrote on Wednesday about peoples' tendency to extrapolate from their own experiences. Lundberg's post is not an accurate description of the software industry as a whole, but it probably is an accurate description of the parts of the software industry he sees on a regular basis. By definition, Lundberg's clients are drawn disproportionately from the minority of software firms with the resources and infrastructure to effectively navigate the patent system. This means he rarely interacts with the vast majority of software-producing firms who only deal with the patent system when they are forced to do so by an unexpected cease-and-desist letter.

Consider, for example, the patent troll Lodsys, which began extorting money from small app developers last year. For the small firms targeted by Lodsys, the rational thing to do is to pay the money Lodsys demands whether or not the target believes he's actually guilty. That's because the legal costs of defending against a patent lawsuit is likely to vastly exceed the amount of money Lodsys is demanding. But because many targets of frivolous patent threats settle their cases quickly, guys like Lundberg rarely interact with them. In other words, Lundberg works with the patent system's winners on a daily basis, but he rarely interacts with the system's losers, even though there are many more of them.

As a result, there's a deep and persistent rift between the community of computer programmers, who are overwhelmingly hostile to software patents, and patent lawyers who seem mystified by all the outrage. The job of a patent lawyer gives him a systematically skewed understanding of how the patent system affects the software industry.