Reducing Software Patent Life-spans

seattle_coder writes: Many have advocated for the elimination of software patents. The arguments generally are that software patents are handed out to easily, and that they're too difficult and expensive to fight. Some say that patents just plain don't make sense for software, which is such a dynamic technology. Given that the standard patent lifetime is 20 years, and software changes so rapidly, is the life-span the problem for software patents? Would reducing the software patent lifetime to 5 years or even less be the thing to do?