Patents work well in other industries, like the mechanical components industry or the drug industry. Copyrights work well in the music and book publishing industry. Cross-licensing of patents by corporations will occur. Advocacy of the abolishment of software patents is extremism. Reinvention in software does not occur often.
Software patents define a legal monopoly which is morally unsound in a free market.
Reinvention occurs often in software. Software patents will make it impossible for the small developer to create software due to the high overhead of lawsuits, licenses, and patent search overheads. Software patent law is being made by the courts, not democratically. A lurking patent may come out of the woodwork of the Patent Office archives to bite any software developer or user. Pending patents applied for are not published.