The problem is not patents, as such. The problem is the recent spate of patents of ideas, rather than inventions. How patents are supposed to work: You come u

The problem is not patents, as such. The problem is the recent spate of patents of ideas, rather than inventions. How patents are supposed to work: You come up with an idea for a novel device. You spend time, money, and effort figuring out how to create your novel device. Once you actually have it working—or at least a detailed schematic, if building a prototype might be cost-prohibitive—you file a patent. That patent does two things: First, it ensures that, for the duration of patent protection, you have sole rights to produce the novel device. Second, it ensures that once that duration expires, anyone with the resources to obtain the raw materials and manpower can create as many of your novel devices as they want. Then in comes the information revolution. There's much less demand for novel devices that do specific things; now people just want software that can run on general-purpose computers. Software is already protected under copyright law, so there's no logical reason for it to be patentable—but some people still want it to be patentable too...with a twist. They don't want to just be able to patent a specific implementation of an idea in software. They want to be able to patent the idea itself, so all they need to do is come up with a thought of a kind of software you could write, translate that thought into patent language, and submit it to the patent office. This is how you end up with idiocy like saying you own the sole rights to "selling people stuff by adding it to a digital shopping cart—over the internet!" TL;DR: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Get rid of software patents, and the whole concept of "patents on ideas", but keep patents on novel devices.