Copyrights and patents solve problems that look similar on the surface, but underneath are completely different. Copyright fixes the ease of theft of creative works, patents fix ease of theft of innovation.
What constitutes theft of creativity? Stealing Mickey Mouse is an extremely concerted act, you have to present a character that is intended to fool people into thinking it's Mickey.
But stealing innovation is much broader. Accompanying a software patent application with illustrative source code will not limit the scope of the patent to copying the code. It covers use of the method, not just the code.
If someone, for instance, applied for a patent by describing an electronic game in which a player controlled character collects tokens inside a maze while computer-controlled characters tried to capture him, and accompanied his application with a full working copy of Pac-Man, then the patent would protect him against clones as well as direct copies. The point is not protecting against copies, that's the job of copyright. The point is the clones.
Patent law is intended to safeguard innovation that one could say would not have happened otherwise.
As to why we need software patents, recent articles have described the legal situation better than I can in a HN comment. Basically there's no legal distinction that has been drawn yet between software patents and other types of patents, one needs to be properly described and that's the job of the Supreme Court. At one point they were banned because they were insufficiently distinguishable from mathematical formulas, which definitely are unpatentable.
Over the years, Congress decided that patents were getting too complex for the court system to properly adjudicate, so they created a separate court to hear patent cases. This court turned out to be friendly to big business and gradually opened the doors to software patents while the Supreme Court chose not to get involved.
What constitutes theft of creativity? Stealing Mickey Mouse is an extremely concerted act, you have to present a character that is intended to fool people into thinking it's Mickey.
But stealing innovation is much broader. Accompanying a software patent application with illustrative source code will not limit the scope of the patent to copying the code. It covers use of the method, not just the code.
If someone, for instance, applied for a patent by describing an electronic game in which a player controlled character collects tokens inside a maze while computer-controlled characters tried to capture him, and accompanied his application with a full working copy of Pac-Man, then the patent would protect him against clones as well as direct copies. The point is not protecting against copies, that's the job of copyright. The point is the clones.
Patent law is intended to safeguard innovation that one could say would not have happened otherwise.
As to why we need software patents, recent articles have described the legal situation better than I can in a HN comment. Basically there's no legal distinction that has been drawn yet between software patents and other types of patents, one needs to be properly described and that's the job of the Supreme Court. At one point they were banned because they were insufficiently distinguishable from mathematical formulas, which definitely are unpatentable.
Over the years, Congress decided that patents were getting too complex for the court system to properly adjudicate, so they created a separate court to hear patent cases. This court turned out to be friendly to big business and gradually opened the doors to software patents while the Supreme Court chose not to get involved.