Without patents, companies use trade secrets more. That&#x27;s worse. Then you never find out how they do it.  Note how secretive Google and Apple have become.  For a while, things could be reverse-engineered. That&#x27;s getting harder; if important parts are in the cloud, you have no access to how they work and no right to reverse engineer.<p>(More)<p>Business method patents are pretty much gone, after the last revision of patent law. Uber can&#x27;t patent their version of a taxi service.  There are still old business method patents, but nobody is winning infringement cases with them.<p>There was a more narrowly focused bill intended to prevent sending out demand letters in bulk.  Not sure what happened to that one.