Patents only cover certain types of creative behavior for which patent protection makes sense as a way to encourage innovation. For example, it's never been po

Patents only cover certain types of creative behavior for which patent protection makes sense as a way to encourage innovation. For example, it's never been possible to patent the plot of a novel, and up until recently it wasn't possible to patent an abstract business process or method. The argument, then, is that patents on software are A) unnecessary to encourage innovation and B) actively discourage innovation. The argument for A) is that plenty of software development happened prior to it being patentable, few software developers or startups consider patentability when creating new products, software itself is well covered by trade secret and copyright protection, and the patents themselves contribute basically nothing to the world's store of knowledge about software. The argument for B) is that most software patent suits are complete BS and are launched either by trolls or in an anti-competitive manner rather than as a result of any sort of actual "theft," any piece of software could potentially infringe on hundreds of patents, patents themselves tend to cover "inventions" that anyone else solving a similar problem would come up with, and that patents themselves thus tend to either discourage people from even trying new ventures, out of fear of being sued, or serve to drain resources from companies that actually produce products, tying up resources that could actually be used for innovation. It's also worth noting that the 17/20 year term of a software patent is completely out of whack with the pace of innovation in software. So you can try to split hairs around saying that some software patents (say those around non-obvious compression schemes) are legitimate, but I'd guess that something close to 99.95% of software patents are trivial/silly/should never have been granted, so in this case I'd argue that's totally worth throwing out that 0.05% of "good" patents in order to ensure that we get rid of the other 99.95% of them. I'd rather see that happen than try to defend that 0.05% and end up keeping even 5% of the current amount of BS patents.