https://dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html

Bessen and Maskin also demonstrated a statistical correlation between the spread of patentability in the United States and a decline in innovation in software.

Giving a monopoly on an idea that would have been created anyway, for no societal gain, is bad policy.

Tickle down economics is complete horseshit, the more money given to media companies does not mean more money given to workers. Workers are always paid the minimum viable amount under capitalism. Creative works are the shared property of humanity.

The patent laws were originally written to specifically prevent patenting mathematical algorithms, and lower courts have basically rewritten the laws to re-permit patenting of mathematical algorithms (which is fundamentally what any software patent is).

This would be caused by the heightening capitalist contradictions in our society. As competition increases the margins grow thinner etc...

“The Software Patent Experiment” by James Bessen (Research on Innovation and Boston University) and Robert M. Hunt (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia) is a sobering less-technical summary of important research they did on software patents. They found that in the 1990s, the firms that were increasingly patenting software were the ones that were decreasing their research and development -- that is, patents are replacing research and development, not encouraging it. They found strong statistic evidence that patents in the software field do not provide an incentive for research and development -- the vast majority of software patents are obtained by firms outside the software industry which have little investment in the software developers required to develop software inventions. They don’t say it directly, but their research results seem to clearly show that software patents have become legalized extortion, instead of a means to encourage innovation.