In what way do you think that patents are broken such that applying them to one field of human invention works, but applying them to another does not? What benefit do you believe that patents bring to other fields? Is there some other way that we could get the same (or better) benefit in those fields?
> In what way do you think that patents are broken such that applying them to one field of human invention works, but applying them to another does not?
Different fields of human invention have different economic characteristics. For a field where patents may be more economically useful than they are in software, consider the pharmaceutical industry. Developing a new drug costs a decade and hundreds of millions, and remains useful for a long time, but once developed is easily copied. None of those conditions are true for software (and there is no equivalent of copyright protection for drugs).
Pharmaceuticals are a poor example because the (bulk of the) costs aren’t inherent to the discovery process, rather they are caused by the regulatory process that ensure safety for patients. I don’t see a good reason why that same regulatory process shouldn’t grant a limited monopoly instead of depending on patent protection.
