"would software patents be as bad if" You've chosen difficult wording here. When you ask if things would be so bad if we lessened their badness the answer is o

"would software patents be as bad if" You've chosen difficult wording here. When you ask if things would be so bad if we lessened their badness the answer is obviously no -- things would be incrementally better if made incrementally better. But this is no more than a tautology. Software patents are bad, in any form. They can be made not-quite-so-bad, but they will always be harmful to the intellectual development of society.