I appreciate your concern and have been on the fence on this issue before. I no longer buy the argument that "Quite apart from encouraging innovation, patents are now stifling it." Especially in the software field. You yourself disqualified your argument when you said,

">The software industry is one of the few industries still strong in America. Even in a time of recession, there are not enough computer programmers to fill all the available positions."

Doesn't sound very stifling.

Software patents, in principal, are no different that patents for machines. You create something new and non-obvious. Many software inventions take years of research and teams of engineers. Patents provide incentives for companies to make these investments in new technologies and people, by assuring the company that they can benefit financially from their investment. We all benefit, especially those hired to develop these new ideas.

Perhaps a better approach would be tighter guidelines around what in software should be patentable. So, software code that reads in thousands of photographs, stitches them together in proper 3D space to create a panorama: patentable. Something obvious like creating an online marketplace where people bid: not patentable.

Thoughts?