Software patents have never contributed anything to society. Software is materially antithetical to patents. You can only ever clearly observe the output of software, and in many cases it's either hard or impossible to investigate the actual method (i.e. the patentable part).
Regular patents work because they are easily** enforceable. If your competitor brings a rip-off of your machine on the market, you can buy one, take it apart, see the similarities with your own eyes, and have a case. If Meta rips off your method to apply an image filter, you better have 10 years of experience in reverse-engineering obfuscated code. Actually, don't even bother. The code runs on their servers and you will never have the opportunity to even investigate it.
The upside to all of this is that a fun, creative interpretation of this exists. Which is that if you really want software patents, obfuscation and DRM should be forbidden so that patent claims can be investigated.
**: Yeah I know that's no longer true in many cases.
Regular patents work because they are easily** enforceable. If your competitor brings a rip-off of your machine on the market, you can buy one, take it apart, see the similarities with your own eyes, and have a case. If Meta rips off your method to apply an image filter, you better have 10 years of experience in reverse-engineering obfuscated code. Actually, don't even bother. The code runs on their servers and you will never have the opportunity to even investigate it.
The upside to all of this is that a fun, creative interpretation of this exists. Which is that if you really want software patents, obfuscation and DRM should be forbidden so that patent claims can be investigated.
**: Yeah I know that's no longer true in many cases.