>> Instead software patents seem to be mostly used to sue people who independently invented the same thing.

>I don't think you can point to any statistic to back this up.

I think that was already clear from the word 'seem'. To me, the same thing seems to be true, actually. That /might/ be caused by the number of software-patent cases I see that fall into this category, or are about trivial inventions, while I simply don't see the cases that do have some merit.

On the other hand, I've never yet seen a software patent related case where I could actually relate to the suing party.