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?
The primary problem is that people who have no understanding of software are issuing patents for software. And so they are issuing patents that are horribly broad or even repeats of existing patents. Things like "linked lists" or "systems for charging customers with a credit card online" are being patented. Which is just obscene. But even aside from that, software is a field where it's very easy to invent something new and innovative at the exact same time as someone else. In fact, concurrent invention is happening constantly. It's very difficult to determine what is "non-obvious" because it all depends on the problem you are trying to solve. Personally, I'm against patents. All patents. Back before the days of big corporations it made sense. But now it's too easy for the big corporations to get patents just for patents sake and then sit on them, or use them as legal weapons against their competition. We're seeing it in software. We're seeing it in biotech. We're seeing it in aerospace engineer. Anywhere where there is patentable stuff and big corporations, patents are ending up stifling innovation and holding us back rather than moving us forward. Here's a great article on Software patent trolls and the damage patents are doing to the software industry: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/26/138576167/when-pat...