[kevinpet]

You say that you approve of RSA because if someone is using it, its inevitable that they learned of it from RSA. I don't think you'd have to go that far to say what's worth patenting. I think that's the purpose of patents -- to make people disclose worthwhile discoveries so that others can benefit from them at a fee -- but they can't be structured that way legally, because unlike copyright, it's very hard to show the origin of ideas.

What makes a patent a bad patent is usually that it's on the idea of what's a good idea to do from a business perspective, and once you've realized that, hey, online auctions are a great idea, the mechanics of writing the code is pretty straightforward, as you say.

I'm not clear how things are de facto in European law, but from reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_258/03 it looks like at least some people are on the right track -- you can patent something involving software, but only if you innovation is technical in nature, not a business innovation that involves a lot of technical details to implement.