Limiting software patents only to "non-obvious" ones sounds good in theory, but I suspect it breaks down in practice. Most software patents are written up in "m

Limiting software patents only to "non-obvious" ones sounds good in theory, but I suspect it breaks down in practice. Most software patents are written up in "mumbo jumbo" language, to use the term from the recent piece on This American Life. If you're a patent examiner, working under a backlog, and every day trying to wrap your head around obfuscated nonsense that doesn't even make sense to the original "inventors", are you really going to do complete diligence to determine obviousness? For that matter, is it even possible to determine? I think it would be simpler just to eliminate software patents entirely. You can cherry-pick maybe one or two examples of possibly beneficial software patents (e.g. public key encryption as you mention), but for the most part software patents have been economically destructive. And further, even stuff like RSA would most likely get created without patents anyway, because that stuff tends to come out of academia where many researchers would be happy just to have some influential papers. I doubt profit motive is really even a significant factor.