In the United States, since the USPTO changed their rules to allow software and business method patents, competition has been hindered and lawyers have profited.
The intent of the USPTO is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to inventors the exclusive right to their respective discoveries...Through the issuance of patents, we encourage technological advancement by providing incentives to invent, invest in, and disclose new technology worldwide.
However, US software patents are a farce. Most software patents granted are for trivial techniques. There is very little or no investment to "discover" these techniques. Filing a US software patent has become a "who can get their first" land grab. One can argue that a patent granted is not necessarily enforcable, however, the resulting struggle benefits lawyers and hurts small companies and competition. This is not the environment we wish to foster.
While Europe was dangerously close to adopting the US software patent guidelines, the UK has declared that it will not allow business patents and it will retain it's strictly narrow rules on software patents which allow only novel software algorithms to be protected. This should protect algorithms such as RSA's encryption and Google's PageRank, while leaving the tens of thousands of frivilous US patents out in the cold.
I would be satisfied if we could draw guidelines similar to the UK and end only frivilous software patents. However, if this proves impossible for us to manage, it will be better to return to our previous state where software patents are invalid, than to continue with the state of software patents we have today.
The software industry is particularly vulnerable to legal action, because many software engineers often don't apply for patents to the many 'obvious' techniques they develop. Years after the first invention of a new technique, a legally savvy company can file a patent application, and years later still may threaten legal action if patent royalties are not paid. Proving prior art then becomes the burden of the defendant, even when the patent never should have been granted in the first place.
One stop-gap in the currently damaging state of software patents is to support services that fight software patent litigators, and help catalog prior art databases.
Find Prior Art:
Other links against software patents: