What, precisely, are “software patents”? It is a suitcase term that includes unrelated things. Technically, it tends to conflate business method patents and alg

What, precisely, are “software patents”? It is a suitcase term that includes unrelated things. Technically, it tends to conflate business method patents and algorithm patents, which have different legal rationales. Most egregious complaints are against business method patents that are largely unenforceable anyway. Algorithm patents are enforceable globally because they are directly reducible to electronic circuits, and electronic circuit designs are patentable and treated as equivalent. The concept of IP is built on top of convenient legal fictions. It was never intended to be consistent. Nonetheless, it recognizes the implications of the cost asymmetry of generating IP versus copying it. There are no trivial economic solutions to the optimization of IP generation, it is an extremely difficult theory problem.