The problem is that basically nobody honest[0] is trying to patent software as a way to make money in their industry by licensing the patent. The honest people

The problem is that basically nobody honest[0] is trying to patent software as a way to make money in their industry by licensing the patent. The honest people are either taking patents out for defensive purposes only, or not at all. The vast majority of software patents are deliberately designed to sound like they claim ownership over things which were state-of-the-art decades prior, so that a patent troll can extract quick settlements out of unwary defendants. The one exception to this is MPEG, but even that is being destroyed by the one-two punch of maliciously-constructed patent pools with overlapping claims designed to get you to pay twice for the same patents... and AO1, which is threatening to both outperform royalty-bearing codecs and doesn't have the problems of three different companies trying to sell you the same thing. The underlying problem is that - separate from any problems that patents might have in general - software developers don't use them, so the Patent Office is ill-equipped to actually adjudicate patentability and prior art in this particular subject field. In some alternate universe where CONTU hadn't massively expanded the scope of copyright by letting it subsume functional works like software, and everyone in the proprietary world was using patents, then maybe there could be an argument for it having a public benefit over no ownership at all. But as it currently stands, software patents are almost exclusively an extortion scheme. [0] I'm going to include most proprietary software vendors in the "honest" category, too.