Can we just please abolish patents? Not just software patents, all of them. Can anyone give me an example of a patent issued in the last twenty years for a novel invention that then proved wildly successful and either protected the inventor from competition or even more importantly led to a lawsuit where the creator successfully beat a large company trying to copy their idea? And even if you can - is the exception outweighing the social cost of the insanity that is our immense tumor of IP lawsuits and intellectual creativity restriction that comes with it?
Fundamentally the courts are today rigged entirely for those who can afford the best lawyers and fight in a quagmire the longest. Even if you do invent something original, these large companies know they can just bleed you dry in court and ignore your patents anyway.
Yet I do not personally see anyone not being inventive or trying new ideas in the absence of a working patent system to protect their monopoly rights to their ideas. Is anyone today waking up the morning thinking "I'm not going to try new ideas because I won't be able to defend patents I file for them against megacorps". I highly doubt that. The people that create the things that are most valuable to us are products of environments that enable them to conduct the research in the first place (IE, they often don't have to do day labor to survive, or can live very comfortably on reduced work hours) rather than incentivizing "inventors" as a discipline that uses the profits of a state granted monopoly to sustain their business.
I mean, even when huge megacorps come up with novel ideas, their competitors will sick lawyers on it and find the closest approximation they can get while having the highest probability of defeating a patent violation lawsuit. And I really hope we are not writing IP law for the sole benefit of international corporations to fund an entire industry of lawyers to waste money arguing about the infringing width of a progress bar.