The sanity of any laws built on top of the patent system require that granted patents make sense and represent actual &quot;inventions&quot;. A patented invention should provide enough detail in the patent filing to allow other experts in the same field to recreate the &quot;invention&quot;. For any sensible definition of a patent that could be related to software, such a filing would include actual source code (or at least very detailed pseudocode.<p>Alas, until issued patents actually represent real inventions, then all the rest of the laws surrounding their use and enforcement will appear utterly insane as well.