Comment Re:It's been a while since math was relevant to CS (Score 1) 219
So when someone develops a way of doing something electronically that is novel, it should be just as worthy of receiving a patent as another idea that needs physical implementation. The milieu shouldn't matter.
The only thing that really matters is whether or not granting patents in some field "promotes progress...", as the US Constitution says, and there are a number of reasons why it is a mistake to think about patents at the individual level and in terms of "worthiness", "natural rights" etc. [q.v. the historical and economic literature]. For example, the purely ethical but very serious concerns arising from the fact that independent invention is no defence in patent law (unlike copyright), and of course the economic fact that patents can actually impede progress and reduce economic welfare.
What does matter is the quality of the idea and the quality of the process to determine the validity of the patent application. This is where the problem lies today. It's not that people shouldn't get patents for software, it's that the patents that are being granted are of such poor quality that it calls into question the whole system.
It does matter but it is by far not the only problem with patent eligibility for software and the whole system has been called into question irrespective of software and quality (by economists and long before software patents even existed). Furthermore, even if somehow only "good" software patents were granted, the overall effect on economic welfare might still be negative, and there are serious barriers (to do with things like patent examination objectivity, cross-field homogeneity of treatment, and what is practically feasible) to filtering out "bad" software patents anyway.