&gt; I could just as easily say &quot;free-riding off somebody else&#x27;s ingenuity is fundamentally unfair&quot;.<p>You could, but it would be ludicrous. The very existence of human civilisation is due to &quot;free-riding off somebody else&#x27;s ingenuity&quot;.<p>&gt; And how often is something in software not been built by simply copying somebody else&#x27;s ideas?<p>Who cares. Not copying ideas is not the purpose of patents, it&#x27;s the exact opposite.<p>&gt; On the other hand, there are studies showing that having patents increases the chances of software startups get VC funding<p>Again, irrelevant. Getting startup funding is not the purpose of patents.<p>If you want the role of patents to be to help startups then that should <i>be</i> their stated role. In which case, you&#x27;d probably only allow companies &lt;5 years old to hold a patent, they&#x27;d only be valid for 5 years, and ownership could not be transferred. Of course then you have something very different from our current system, but frankly it sounds a lot better.