I used to think they were entirely useless, but since then I've learned of many instances where a much better technology is developed because the first iteration is patented.

For example, the Wright brothers biggest contribution to aviation was suing everyone using wing warping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war) which greatly advanced the adoption of the much more advanced ailerons.

Software patents have a similar effect, for example Cisco's patent on Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol led to the development of the more secure and more capable Common Address Redundancy Protocol (https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/SA/v14/i05/a6.htm).

We tend to invest heavily in whatever we can get working first, but it's rarely close to an ideal way of doing something. By pushing every developer to find a newer, better way of doing something, patents prevent stagnation and lead to more advanced technologies.

A patent was meant to give a solo genius a way to treat their idea as something tangible, at a time when logistics was much slower and the world revolved around the physical.

Maybe they try to develop it themselves, maybe they sell the idea to a big corporation that has the resources to implement it. Either way, genius begets profit, and the world gets genius ideas... in theory anyway.

But a genuine idea back then needed a long time frame to actually do something with it. 20 years seemed reasonable at the time.

The world is less logistically constrained these days. Make it 5 years, no renewals.

I don't think patents are inherently evil, however they certainly can be used for evil.

But The basic idea is sound. If you invent a novel mechanism and publish it the government will grant you exclusive economic exploitation rights to that mechanism for the next 25 years. After that it is now fair game.

It is an attempt to solve the real problem that it is much harder to be first than second, the guy in first place has to spend all that time and effort to develop the thing, and the guy in second just has to copy the guy in first. To rectify this social injustice the patent system was developed, where the government would grant and enforce economic exploitation rights of the mechanism to the inventor.

Software patents, no. They're just evil.

More like an optional evil that benefits laywers, lawmakers and ill intentioned folks and makes everyone else way worse off.

I would recommend that great academic (but very digest) book titled "Against Intellectual Monopoly" to understand why the answer is most certainly "no" (though, their answser is closer to "yes" for pharmacetical patents).

Our demand for perfectionism prevent any progress. I would consider shortening patent length that can help everyone. With all the improvements in the world we could afford shorter window.

At least in the chemistry/pharma industries, yes, due to the (necessary) regulatory structures there.

But in modern tech? No.

I think of them as legalised marijuana. It is not good for you, but if it were made illegal, there will be criminal organisations providing the service. Without patents, we would be mired in NDAs dictating which company can talk to which other company about what technology, and quite possibly several open-source developers passing away in mysterious circumstances.

So I see it as unavoidable evil. The patent system makes it lawful evil as opposed to chaotic evil, which is strictly speaking an improvement.

Software patents may be what saves the field. Currently copyright as an IP protection for software has been rendered near meaningless by AI. If I can get one AI to reverse engineer Photoshop, and another to implement the produced spec, I have a copyright-clean version of Photoshop.

Patents protect the idea of a particular program. And in the post-AI world, it's the idea that holds the value, not the implementation. Implementations are cheap now.

Another alternative to preventing the entire software market from collapsing is to revive the Whelan v. Jaslow copyright standard, under which the abstract "structure, sequence, and organization" of a program is eligible for copyright. But programmers would bristle at that almost as much as robust patent protection for software. Until, that is, the money comes in with mouths to feed and mortgages to pay...