Why are data transfer objects (DTOs) an anti-pattern?

Some projects have all data twice. Once as domain objects, and once as data transfer objects.

This duplication has a huge cost, so the architecture needs to get a huge benefit from this separation to be worth it.

DTOs are not an anti-pattern. When you're sending some data across the wire (say, to an web page in an Ajax call), you want to be sure that you conserve bandwidth by only sending data that the destination will use. Also, often it is convenient for the presentation layer to have the data in a slightly different format than a native business object.

I know this is a Java-oriented question, but in .NET languages anonymous types, serialization, and LINQ allow DTOs to be constructed on-the-fly, which reduces the setup and overhead of using them.

DTO an AntiPattern in EJB 3.0 says:

The heavy weight nature of Entity Beans in EJB specifications prior to EJB 3.0, resulted in the usage of design patterns like Data Transfer Objects (DTO). DTOs became the lightweight objects (which should have been the entity beans themselves in the first place), used for sending the data across the tiers... now EJB 3.0 spec makes the Entity bean model same as Plain old Java object (POJO). With this new POJO model, you will no longer need to create a DTO for each entity or for a set of entities... If you want to send the EJB 3.0 entities across the tier make them just implement java.io.Serialiazable