The problem I see with (software) patents, is that they don't account for two individuals having the same idea on their own. Specially in todays quickly evolvin

The problem I see with (software) patents, is that they don't account for two individuals having the same idea on their own. Specially in todays quickly evolving society, something can become viable from one moment to another and there's room for several people to have an idea before the first one can actually implement it. At this point, patent law doesn't protect any invention from being stolen, as it's supposed to, but instead denies people the right to sell their own original idea because someone else registered it first. The main reasons why this seems to become more and more of a problem are a) globalization means patents have a much longer reach b) the increasing pace of technological advances makes it harder to be aware of every possible invention in a field and c) the increase in supporting technology makes even complex-sounding inventions trivial to implement. With all those things in mind, my opinion is that the trade-off has tipped over the point of balance; it used to be that patent laws predominantly protected the rights of inventors from intellectual theft; these days, more than anything, it's abused to legally lock inventors out of selling their creations. I'd say patent law, as a concept, needs a complete rework. It's just not fit for the 21st century anymore. Think using voice control to turn on your toaster; it sounds like quite a task, but it becomes trivial by leveraging technologies like Googles voice assistance, IFTTT and some cheap IoT hardware.