[cguess]

The main reason it exists is to provide incentive for people to actually create things and to spend the money on R&D with a hope there will be a return. If I spend three years and $500,000 developing a new building material, I should be able to be protected from an employee of mine quitting and starting a new company doing the same thing from techniques he learned using my invention (for a certain period of time).

Software is a different beast, simply because the vagueness you can express in a software patent can be so general that it covers use cases almost retroactively.

Software patents should be extremely specific, regular patents work for the most part.

[nileshtrivedi]

Patents are an incentive to disclose the techniques behind inventions. Plenty of incentives already exist to create things and invest in R&D.

[tjl]

My thought has been that they need to go back to requiring a physical implementation. So, if you devise a hardware product that includes software, the whole thing can be patented, but not the specific algorithms. This eliminates all the business process patents and basically software patents as well.

[jheriko]

I think a very large part of innovation comes from people who would do it anyway. Supporting them is great.

The current system is in everyone's worst interest. Getting there first shouldn't be worth as much as being able to provide an excellent quality of product or service - software or otherwise. You certainly shouldn't be able to hold up all of humanity's progress for the entire future because you can claim priority.

[spacemanmatt]

Software is abstract. Abstract subjects are strictly ineligible.