Patents are an incentive to invent something new, with the knowledge that you alone will be able to profit from that thing for some period of time. The idea is

Patents are an incentive to invent something new, with the knowledge that you alone will be able to profit from that thing for some period of time. The idea is that this incentive will benefit society with these inventions more than it will cost society in reduced competition. Looking at the software market today, I think it's pretty clear that the incentive that patents create for software innovations is not needed and that the cost that they create greatly outweighs the benefits. I can not think of any software innovations that would not have been made without the incentive of monopoly protection.