NO. It&#x27;s the fact that the actual <i>inventors of an idea</i> can get some of the value from their idea instead of the one lucky company that finally manages to get an idea to market and make profit from it. Software&#x27;s is full of brilliant ideas that brought close to <i>zero</i> benefit to their inventor. People like Alan Key or Doug Engelbart, and other much younger &quot;idea people&quot; that few even hear of, deserve(d) to be billionaires just as much as Mark Zuckerberg.<p>I do believe that software patents should exist, but I believe that they should <i>only</i> be granted to <i>individuals</i> (<i>maybe</i> to non-profit foundations), never to companies! And they should work in a way that nobody can use a patent to prevent you from using his&#x2F;her algorithm, but only to force you to pay a minimum amount (set at contract creation) per N users (if you&#x27;re a P&#x2F;SaaS company).<p>The software industry is creating tons of value, but I&#x27;d argue that less than 1% of it goes to where it should: it just piles up the food chain in the hope of being later redistributed by <i>philanthropy!</i><p>And yes, writing such a law would be f HARD, you&#x27;d have to really train a new generation of software-expert-patent-clerks and software-expert-lawyers and judges for it to work and don&#x27;t do stupid things like patent trivialities that would then stifle everyone else.<p>Oh, and I really believe that patents should not even be about benefiting society. They should benefit the &quot;idea creators&quot;, shifting some of the immense wealth from the &quot;idea distributors&quot; and &quot;idea marketers&quot;. As long as there are still problems unsolved in the universe, <i>ideas are always in short supply!</i> A problem can only be still unsolved because: (a) we have no idea how to solve it, or (b) we have no idea how to solve it <i>cheap enough.</i> And the whole &quot;we only need to sit and implement properly the ideas we already have&quot; is crap! Idea-space is <i>infinite</i>, so you can always randomly come over a new idea that allows you to do the same thing you&#x27;re already doing but at 0.1% of the cost and that instantly changes everything.<p>Let&#x27;s say Joe Web comes up with a new idea for building CRUD web apps 1000x faster and cheaper. The saved $$$ from this will end up being shifted to other things. And let&#x27;s say that 0.01% of the saved money gets shifted to something like <i>cancer research.</i> (Or maybe the shift was more subtle: Joe&#x27;s colleague Moe got fired from making CRUD apps and then went up to learn to program protein molecular dynamics simulation software that later enabled a breakthrough discovery in medicine.). And at some point this research produces a result. Then Joe Web absolutely deserves some 0.000000Y% of the benefit that society got from a cure for cancer. And that minuscule percent could be <i>a lot!</i> And we have no way of distributing this profit back to idea creators right now. Unless we grant software patents to individuals. (And no, the fact that he simply &quot;benefited from the cure for cancer&quot; is not enough. Maybe he was already extra lucky and neither he nor anyone who cares about would ever have been affected by this disease anyway.)<p>Even if people create ideas even without reward, it doesn&#x27;t mean they shouldn&#x27;t get that reward.<p>In the end <i>society should serve the interests of the individual, not the other way around!</i> This is <i>why we&#x27;ve created society in the first place and why we continue to put up with it!</i>