I think the annoying thing to me was trying to make me believe that a software that ran on Voyager's computer system was capable of having an overactive imagination, was capable of feeling the pleasure of sex, and was angry about perceived injustices towards it. That's all.
Data was designed to be an AI. It's not hard to make an unlimited AI. The federation computers were designed to be beasts of burden. They need limited or even retarded AI. It's mean and stupid to give AI the capacity to recognize injustice and feel pain. You'll be in for an insurrection post haste.
When he read the Caretaker script, the Doctor was a small part with few lines, so he didn't see much growth potential. Fortunately, his adlibbing a line during the audition ("I'm a doctor, not a nightlight") may have won him the role.
I'll add my voice to the chorus agreeing Picardo was one of the best things about Voyager and kept it watchable amid all the Chakotay stinkers and Tom Paris shuttle crashes.
It is true that Data was designed to mimic human sentience and the Doctor was not. And it's clear that in Caretaker, the Doctor was not sentient. However, if you accept sentience of mechanical creatures in episodes like Evolution and Emergence gained sentience, then it follows that a program that is able to rewrite its own wiring according to new situations it comes across is capable of gaining sentience. (At least in the Trek universe) It would have been cool if at some point The Doctor cited the precedent of Data vs Maddox to make the claim to treatment as a sentient being.
The Doctor was designed to mimic sentience to a point. Data was designed to be sentient. The Doctor is however a lot larger than Data, the whole of between the walls in sick bay (initially) and 40 years more advanced than what Soong was working with. Data is a stunning example of miniaturization and mobility, whereas the Doctor is neither. The Doctor may be able to appear more sentient than Data because his existence is the product of millions of competing engineers perfecting the science to a degree of hyper realism for the last 20 years, but seeming more "real" isn't what makes you sentient, it's about how you think, how you come to decisions and what limits the proccess. Of course by that reasoning a Borg drone isn't sentient. It isn't. It's a sleeping person.
Come to think of it, I'm watching Author, Author right now, and why didn't they cite Data as precedent for giving rights to artificial intelligence? Seems like the writers made an oversight. The Doctor wasn't designed to be sentient the way Data was, but it has been well established in Star Trek mythology that non-sentient machines can become sentient by becoming more complex. I think any debate about sentience in a Star Trek series has to use the established rules of the Star Trek universe.
I think Picardo got the best part, and it was mostly because he A) is a good actor and B) lobbied hard with the writers for interesting stuff. An actor shouldn't HAVE to access writers to like, be good, but it seemed to have worked in his case.
Author, Author! isn't about civil rights for holograms. It's about authorial control of their product, especially against time pressures. Think of the writers' room at Voyager bitching about Berman taking the latest draft script just because he wants to start now, instead of waiting until they have it right. Measure of a Man is wholly irrelevant. They could have centered the episode on Tom Paris, except that Paris was so perfect he wouldn't make a horrible draft that needed to be rewritten. Also, McNiell never really could carrry an episode.
If you're referring to Measure of a Man, there it was legally ruled that Data simply was not the property of Starfleet and for that reason did not have to expose himself to a possibly destructive investigative procedure ... unless he choose to. The events with Lal (years later) show that artificial intelligences do not have rights (certainly not full rights) within the Federation. "Is he the property of Starfleet? No."
and and finally... When you get down to it, in the final evaluation, the ruling was as if Abraham Lincoln had freed only one extraordinary black person who seemed to be just as "competent" as a white person and not 2/3rds of a white person like the rest, instead of all of the black people. It was a chickenshit ruling.
I think it called for at least a throwaway line: "I cite the case of Data vs Maddox, in which a machine intelligence was granted the rights of a sentient being." It seems like the first thing a lawyer who researched the issue would come across to me. Yeah, it did seem like the ruling was a 'Sidestep the issue' ruling, and a cowardly attempt not to be the judge to gave holograms rights.
Again as someone else pointed out, it's wasn't about civil rights. They had to determine if they considered a hologram "real" first before they even considered if he qualified as a sentient machine. The argument was: is the Doctor anymore real that a cartoon character?
I wonder if this is just a case if they mentioned Maddox of Louvois(might have misspelled that) they'd have to pay royalties. Though Voyager was never shy about after referencing TNG. Also... why didn't Zimmerman testify in that instead of Barclay by proxy? Was the actor who played him not available?
Being Barclay was testifying about how the EMH went and saved Zimmerman in Life Line... yes. He also appeared in DS9's Doctor Bashir I Presume previously too.