James F. "Jim" Moore

You have ownership over your ideas. You can keep your ideas to yourself.  You can share them.

Society needs markets for creative ideas.  Innovators invest in solving problems and then provide those ideas, for a fee, to others who implement them. 

Ideas are particularly easy to steal.  Ideas are very difficult to
sell, because in order for a price to be negotiated, the idea must be
disclosed.  Once the idea is disclosed, a potental buyer is often in a
position to simply take the idea.

To make a market for innovation and creativity work requires some form of registration and protection of the property right.

For some forms of property, society sets up systems to help secure those rights through registration and protection.  It is in the interest of society to do this, to reduce disputes and to facilitate trade.

Land title and title insurance, automobile titles, investment securities laws, copyrights and patents all provide the function of securing a property right in order to reduce disputes and facilitate trade.

From Wikipedia:

Patents in general

A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a patentee (the inventor or assignee) for a limited period of time.

To obtain a patent, inventors must file patent applications
in each and every country that they want protection in, such as Japan,
China, the US or India. Some regional offices exist, such as the European Patent Office,
which act as supranational bodies with the power to grant patents which
can then be brought into effect in the member states. A European
patent, for example, can be brought into effect in up to 36 countries
in or neighbouring the European Union. Although there are no worldwide patents, the Patent Cooperation Treaty provides a unified patent application filing procedure for most countries of the world.

Patent applications must disclose how to make and use the invention
in sufficient detail so that another person of ordinary skill in the
art can reproduce the invention without undue experimentation. If it is
not self evident, then a patent application must also disclose what
practical utility an invention has.

The history of the US patent system is that when a new
domain of innovation arises, such as drugs or biotechnology, the patent office
adapts.  This is all to the good. This is indeed the way the system
advances. 

Some make the argument that software patents are somehow less valid than other
forms of patents because they only became recognized in the late 1980s. But this is
because software itself only became recognized as an independent domain of
innovation at about that time.  The situation with software is no
different than the situation with internal combustion engines 100 year
ago.

Software, up until the 1980s, was seen as something that hardware companies
gave away in order to sell their machines.  I worked as a management consultant to Sun and AT&T on Unix SystemV.4.  At the time Bill Joy was Sun’s chief software architect, and even with his genius software was not yet really recognized as a standalone value.

The revolution in information
technology happened when operating systems became modular enough and open
enough for software to flourish as a distinct field of innovation.  While this began to happen in a big with with the IBM 360 mainframe, it did not really take off until the personal computer era. Software
engineers went from second class to first class citizens.  Schools of
engineering introduced degrees in software engineering.  Software patents
arose during this same time, as software innovation began to be recognized
independently from hardward. 

Software patents are vital to protect innovation that, in modern information
architectures, is layered above hardware.  Software patents are
particularly important, because most innovation in technology is now in the
software layer.  The reason that large companies like IBM focus on
weakening software patents is that they know that this is the future. 
Independent thinkers should be stepping up to defend patents for software,
unless they want to become technoserfs of the large corporations.

For those with a scholarly bent, here from WikiPedia is the history of software patents:

The first software patent ever granted is probably a patent for a
“computer having slow and quick access storage, when programmed to
solve a linear programming problem by an iterative algorithm, the
iterative algorithm being such that (…)” applied for in 1962 by British Petroleum Company ([2], see end of page 3). The patent relates to solving simultaneous linear equations.

The USPTO
has traditionally not considered software to be patentable because by
statute patents can only be granted to “processes, machines, articles
of manufacture, and compositions of matter”. In particular patents
cannot be granted to “scientific truths” or “mathematical expressions”
of them. This means that most of the fundamental techniques of software
engineering have never been patented.

The USPTO maintained this position, that software was in effect a
mathematical algorithm, and therefore not patentable into the 1980′s. The
position of the USPTO was challenged with a landmark 1981 Supreme Court case, Diamond
v. Diehr. The case involved a device that used computer software to ensure
the correct timing when heating, or curing, rubber. Although the software was
the integral part of the device, it also had other functions that related to
real world manipulation. The court then ruled that as a device to mold rubber,
it was a patentable object. The court essentially ruled that while algorithms
themselves could not be patented, devices that utilized them could. This ruling
wasn’t as straightforward as many would have liked, forcing many electronic
device makers into the courts to establish that their inventions were in fact
patentable. [3]

Due to different treatment of federal patent rights in different parts of
the country, in 1982
the U.S. Congress created a new court (the Federal Circuit)
to hear patent cases. The new circuit rejected rulings from some parts of the
country, and nationalized others. For example, the court made patents generally
easier to uphold by presuming patents were valid unless proven invalid and
weakening the defence of non-obviousness. This court
allowed issues, such as patentability of software, to be treated uniformly
throughout the US.
Due to a few landmark cases in this court, by the early 1990s the
patentability of software was well established, and in 1996 the USPTO issued Final Computer
Related Examination Guidelines. See Software patents under
United States patent law.

In Europe, the EPO and other national patent offices
have issued many granted patents for inventions involving software since the European Patent Convention (EPC) came
into force in the late 1970s. Article 52 of the EPC excludes “programs for
computers” from patentability (Art. 52(2)) to the extent that a patent
application relates to a computer program “as such” (Art. 52(3)).
This has been interpreted to mean that any invention which makes a non-obvious
“technical contribution” or solves a “technical problem” in
a non-obvious way is patentable even if a computer program is used in the
invention. See Software patents
under the European Patent Convention.