&gt; <i>Software patents provide no benefit to society</i><p>Deployed correctly, they can spur competition. Finance has no concept of intellectual property. If a small shop invents a security, and it does well, the big shops copy it overnight. This is good, from a product-diversity perspective. It is bad, however, from a firm-diversity perspective. Balancing those perspectives is what this debate is about. Slanting to one extreme or another isn&#x27;t helpful.