SOFTWARE PATENTS are nothing but trouble to everyone but patent lawyers/trolls and monopolists. What is it that such patents actually bring to an industry? What about the fabric of society? Let's look at a preliminary list:

• Patent trolls abundance
• Incentive to non-practising entities including patent hoarders
• Researchers being fenced out or faced with barriers of appropriation
• EU patent (unitary patent), which increases damages and scale of the patent menace
• Distrust among public figures (e.g. due to software patents in the USPTO)
• Patent deals with Android/Linux royalties
• Removal of features from Linux-based devices, using patents
• Suppression of inclusion or development of features, e.g. ZFS
• Reducing the speed of software development (patent reviews, surveys, licensing, etc.)
• Increasing uncertainty and doubt among software developers, discouraging the occupation
• FUD campaigns based on software patents (claiming Linux to be disrespectful or prone to litigation)
• Suppression of GPLv3 adoption (which impedes TiVoisation)
• Reduced trust in politics and politicians, who are subjected to heavy lobbying and disinformation
• Increased cost of products that the public buys
• Excessive preoccupation/overburdening of public courts, which deal with petty patent feuds rather than real offences
• Encouragement of software cartels that pool patents to make up a thicket
• Discouragement of standards that have patents applying to them (including submarine patents)
• Derivative works de-emphasised
• Misuse of taxpayers' money (e.g. NASA auctioning of patents)
• Distraction from technical skills due to bureaucracy and unavoidable complexity associated with otherwise-unnecessary skills
• Wasted effort due to reimplementation and patent workarounds
• Reduced staffing of developers and increased staffing of lawyers (and patent applications-geared professionals), thus less market for programmers
• Decrease in the number of programming languages and frameworks (duplicity and inspiration as a violation)
• Syntax plurality, which puts more learning burden on developers
• Increased tension and distrust between companies and respective developers
• Degraded access to multimedia (codec patents for the most part), impeding information access especially in developing nations
• Reduced interoperability and resultant inefficiency
• Code and pseudo-code turned to legalese/text, harming the teaching of technical skills