Good parallel. One of the points for having patents was to reduce the amount of secrecy in technology IP rights allow companies to share knowledge without fear

Good parallel. One of the points for having patents was to reduce the amount of secrecy in technology IP rights allow companies to share knowledge without fear of competing against their invention. This is covered by a form of IP: trade secrets. This is a legitimate argument for patents in several fields, and for allowing patents for software parts of machines (users of such machinery are better off as a group if they can find out about its workings). Perhaps users of securities are put at risk by the trade secrecy governing securities innovation and so financial patents should be allowed: certainly, failure to understand risks associated with financial instruments was a large part of the problem in the 2007/8 financial crisis. For software it is not so useful: patented software typically is triple protected: by the patent, by copyright, and by secrecy, since the patent applies to ideas in the source code that are not visible in the deployed binary. So software patents do not promote transparency.