NO. It's the fact that the actual inventors of an idea can get some of the value from their idea instead of the one lucky company that finally manages to get an idea to market and make profit from it. Software's is full of brilliant ideas that brought close to zero benefit to their inventor. People like Alan Key or Doug Engelbart, and other much younger "idea people" that few even hear of, deserve(d) to be billionaires just as much as Mark Zuckerberg.

I do believe that software patents should exist, but I believe that they should only be granted to individuals (maybe to non-profit foundations), never to companies! And they should work in a way that nobody can use a patent to prevent you from using his/her algorithm, but only to force you to pay a minimum amount (set at contract creation) per N users (if you're a P/SaaS company).

The software industry is creating tons of value, but I'd argue that less than 1% of it goes to where it should: it just piles up the food chain in the hope of being later redistributed by philanthropy!

And yes, writing such a law would be f HARD, you'd have to really train a new generation of software-expert-patent-clerks and software-expert-lawyers and judges for it to work and don't do stupid things like patent trivialities that would then stifle everyone else.

Oh, and I really believe that patents should not even be about benefiting society. They should benefit the "idea creators", shifting some of the immense wealth from the "idea distributors" and "idea marketers". As long as there are still problems unsolved in the universe, ideas are always in short supply! A problem can only be still unsolved because: (a) we have no idea how to solve it, or (b) we have no idea how to solve it cheap enough. And the whole "we only need to sit and implement properly the ideas we already have" is crap! Idea-space is infinite, so you can always randomly come over a new idea that allows you to do the same thing you're already doing but at 0.1% of the cost and that instantly changes everything.

Let's say Joe Web comes up with a new idea for building CRUD web apps 1000x faster and cheaper. The saved $$$ from this will end up being shifted to other things. And let's say that 0.01% of the saved money gets shifted to something like cancer research. (Or maybe the shift was more subtle: Joe's colleague Moe got fired from making CRUD apps and then went up to learn to program protein molecular dynamics simulation software that later enabled a breakthrough discovery in medicine.). And at some point this research produces a result. Then Joe Web absolutely deserves some 0.000000Y% of the benefit that society got from a cure for cancer. And that minuscule percent could be a lot! And we have no way of distributing this profit back to idea creators right now. Unless we grant software patents to individuals. (And no, the fact that he simply "benefited from the cure for cancer" is not enough. Maybe he was already extra lucky and neither he nor anyone who cares about would ever have been affected by this disease anyway.)

Even if people create ideas even without reward, it doesn't mean they shouldn't get that reward.

In the end society should serve the interests of the individual, not the other way around! This is why we've created society in the first place and why we continue to put up with it!