As a coder (and please all the other coders on here), what's your stance on the patent mess right now? To my mind (and I'm not a programmer, for what it's worth), I think that a computer program is a text, and therefore should be subject to copyright, but not patent rules. The whole idea of patenting, well, an idea, is absolutely silly, in my opinion. And, its ruining innovation in the tech sector (biology, too, for similar reasons).
Yeah I agree with that reasoning. In addition, there's a broader problem with patents that software is just one symptom of. I'm still uncertain whether it's affecting innovation, however. Perhaps the patent system was needed to encourage innovation in a different time. Now we pretty much as a society buy that innovation is good. Perhaps patents are a sort of vestigial organ for large swathes of the state space. Broken patents don't cause people to stop innovating. They just cause people to stop patenting true innovations, and to retreat to trade secrets. The only people still filing patents in the tech industry are the dinosaurs and the clueless noobs.