>How is someone supposed to innovate if they don’t know that a patent won’t be granted tomorrow for a drop-down menu or, “accessing sequential bytes on magnetic media” or whatever.

I'm sorry but this kind of hyperbole is ridiculous. Do you invent? Are you involved in infringement contentions? What is your basis for this view? This isn't an appeal to authority, I'm just trying to understand from where you have gotten this perspective.

Having a granted patent is of limited utility when it's so generic as to be easily voided as one you described. I don't think these kinds of threats hold significant water to anyone seriously involved in patenting, and I don't think it stifles the ability for anyone to invent something much more useful. That latter contention is a bit ridiculous. Prior patents are no constraints on future inventions. It's only the practicing of a patent that leads to infringement.

>The purposes stated imply that the publishing of a patent is a good alternative to keeping things a trade secret, and that while you couldn’t copy and sell a patented item you could use a patent to learn from and that it thus advances the state of the art. I think in reality though, all software patents are nonsense legalese and used in massive dck-waving contests between large companies. Nobody successful studied existing software patents as a way to advance their knowledge.

This is the kind of thing I see here a lot. I'm not sure how connected it is to reality. My impression is that this sentiment is born of tech-heavy media, which likes to catastrophize the patent system. I saw someone upthread say that the "Cloudfront" decision was monumental, it wasn't. It was a regular day validity argument, the sorts of which routinely sink bad patents. It did not make the legal news.

There is a truth to the idea that there should be less bad patents. That is obviously the goal. But I noticed you didn't really engage with what I described as the problem space patent has to deal with. Instead, you arbitrarily drew the lines at software patents, because of how you* feel about them, which is something likely resultant of the media you read and not your professional experience, from what I'm gathering.

>Nobody successful studied existing software patents as a way to advance their knowledge.

This completely misses the point. They are in the public domain, they are in the body of knowledge. Saying that people don't read every published patent, so it's a stupid system, really only betrays the fact that you aren't thinking about it very deeply. The alternative is what you described, a world of trade secrets where none of this is known. Acting like patents are dumb because you instead read things in textbooks isn't the slam dunk you think it is when the alternative was not reading about it at all, ever.

>Any approach that doesn’t acknowledge the absolute perversion of patent law to serve completely different ends than intended, especially in the software market, is not in my opinion a good faith argument.

Absolute perversion? Give me a break. There's not much for us to discuss if you're going to just make huge emotional equivocations and then call anyone who disagrees "bad faith." I'm not sure what you think that contributed to this conversation. There's no shortage of people here making extreme statements about the patent system based upon their general ignorance of how it functions, what it grants, and how they are applied. I see tons of false assumptions conveyed with these kinds of statements, and I don't think they help.