From:
http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/linus-torvalds,-geek-of-the-week/

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RM:  'Do you think software patents are a good idea?'
  
LT:  'Heh - definitely not. They're a disaster. The whole point (and
the original idea) behind patents in the US legal sense was to
encourage innovation. If you actually look at the state of patents in
the US today, they do no such thing. Certainly not in software, and
very arguably not in many other areas either.

Quite the reverse - patents are very much used to stop competition,
which is undeniably the most powerful way to encourage innovation.
Anybody who argues for patents is basically arguing against open
markets and competition, but they never put it in those terms.

So the very original basis for the patents is certainly not being
fulfilled today, which should already tell you something. And that's
probably true in pretty much any area.

But the reason patents are especially bad for software is that
software isn't some single invention where you can point to a single
new idea. Not at all. All relevant software is a hugely complex set of
very detailed rules, and there are millions of small and mostly
trivial ideas rather than some single clever idea that can be
patented. The worth of the software is not in any of those single
small decisions, but in the whole.  It's also distressing to see that
people patent ‘ideas’. It's not even a working "thing"; it's just a
small way of doing things that you try to patent, just to have a
weapon in an economic fight. Sad. Patents have lost all redeeming
value, if they ever had any. ' 


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