While Company A copying Company B might work in theory, there's still the matter of whether or not Company B has access to the source code (assuming Company A d

While Company A copying Company B might work in theory, there's still the matter of whether or not Company B has access to the source code (assuming Company A didn't open source the thing they spent all that time on). In a hardware sense, I can take apart an object (like a smart phone), and see how it works. In a software sense, it's much harder to decompile something and see how it is working if the scope of the project is large enough. Software patents are bad (in my opinion) because the things which get patented are the things that form the foundation for what almost every programmer works with in their daily routine. Things that are abstract ideas such as "Connecting to a server to process a payment" might seem like a logical thing to patent as a software idea, but if I transferred it to its real life analogue it becomes unpatentable as a business practice: Person A gives payment to Person B, who then forwards payment to Person C. All this being said, I'm not aware of any legitimate software patent suit that didn't involve corporate espionage. Can anyone link anything to show me a legitimate use of our court system in order to protect an innovation that should be protected?