TechDirt has an interesting write-up and commentary about a recent Brookings Institution conference on software patents. The writer suggests the real problem is that the members of the different fields present — lawyers on the one hand and economists and technologists on the other — simply have very different experiences, and thus understandings, of the nature of the work and of the problems associated with it. One commenter to the write-up pointed out that a fourth field, businesses that pay for software to be developed, is implied and that it probably falls in line with the lawyers.
I have yet to make my way through Zizek’s Parallax View, but I suspect that it’s describing a similar phenomenon.