Of course, you can and should extend your logic to condemn ALL patents.
Suggest readers go to www.mises.org and search on patents for lots of arguments on why patents are never a good idea.
“The fashion industry, for example, has no concept of patent protection, and…”
He he, wat a claim! In the fashion industry, the sue you for every little “look a like” thing. Why hassle with patents?
I can only agree. And not with just one view, but all of them. Software… ideas, even, are such complex things that you all may be right, and wrong, at the same time.
The Chinese don’t recognize patent laws at all. They have copied many of the world’s finest cars and intend mass producing them as soon as possible, for sale even here in the US. They may solve the patent problems as far as software is concerned as soon as they find out they can make a dollar at it. Microsoft, hide your ass, Ubuntu, hide behind a tree, the Chinese are coming! the Chinese are coming!
All opposition to patents comes from people who aren’t creative and think only work that pays regular wages is legitimate.
Such people are closer to beasts than gods and $8/hr is all they’re worth.
The innovators are the ones who, at great personal risk, drive the rest of the human race forward. Society’s rewards for such people should know no limit.
Look at societies that neither recognize nor reward innovation. Their citizens have all ended up being nothing more than bio-industrial production units.
If the only rationale for justifying software patents is that any process can be patented, I claim dibs on Newton’s method for square roots!
A famous case of patent farming, BTW, is when LZW was published in a computer magazine without revealing that it is patent pending. Eventually Sperry Research got the patent, then were bought by Unisys, which then began suing software vendors. Some of the file formats affected by this are the Unix compress format and the GIF format.
This is nonsense, software patents are the only thing keeping all small to midsized businesses in the software industry from being eaten alive by parties like Microsoft and Google.
Professional programming is different from writing code from your attic as a hobby, it entails a lot of costs, and having your prizewinning breakthrough snatched out of your hands by a multinational conglomerate will make it pointless to ever try.
Perhaps, instead of winning a case in the highest courts that shows software patenting is wrong, we should try to win a patent case on a fundamental building block (ie for-loop or access modifiers) then charge for licenses. The entire industry will fall over and the law will be forced to drop software patents to get civilization back on track.
Absurd enough to work? 
A very good post and excellent follow-up comments!
I agree with the arms-race analogy and the fact that when a typical giant company patents software it is not generally a benign move to protect their IP.
The sad part of it all is that a patent application is now more of a battle of legalese than an honest attempt to register a piece of innovative software. The outcome of an IP litigation, which earns several IP troll companies their bread, is often ridiculous.
Everyone has the right to earn money, to recover their research costs, to let the world know what they invented; but given that the ethics of it have not been set in stone, the game has turned really ugly and the companies have turned into greedy Hutts.
“but limit their lifetime to 5 years in the normal case, with up to 10 years for extraordinarily patents (like mpeg or other more complicated inventions).”
I agree - this sounds like a really good short-term solution. And you’d have to make sure new patents at a later date can’t be applied back on something like MPEG - and software patents won’t be given/ can be revoked if it can be shown that those ideas where already present in circulation at an earlier date.
Software patents will kill off the small guys