Now, my companies were certainly playing the defensive game, as you point out. And, in almost every case, the USPTO examiners were not well-trained enough in the specific area of art, nor did they have the tools, to determine with certainty how innovative these were. They issued some pro-forma objections based on rudimentary database searches and sometimes required claim narrowing – usually unjustified, in my view – before granting allowances. I should also point out that I have also had applications completely rejected, and rightfully so, based on earlier applications in process, which I did not know about at the time of filing. And, who knows, it may emerge from litigation that some of my patents were indeed anticipated by others.

These – and yours – are all arguments for why any intellectual property protection regime run by humans will make mistakes, and possibly be inefficient in an economic utility sense. But, as Adam points out, this is NOT specific to software. “Incrementalism”, legal overhead, lack of expertise by government employees – these have always existed in all fields. If these are grounds for abolishing software patents, then virtually all patents should be abolished.

So, the question becomes one of fundamentals: do individuals have rights in their intellectual property? If so, some IP protection scheme is a proper function of government. We should endeavor to improve it, to advocate for clarity and efficiency, to draw objective boundaries around its domain. But, to “abolish” protection for an arbitrary class of inventions, where some of those inventions are actually useful innovations, would be a violation of individual rights, and therefore wrong. Just because you and other software engineers (even if it’s “almost every” one you’ve spoken to on the subject) find the current protection regime to be inconvenient in your field does not invalidate these principles.