Martin Fowler is a well-respected thinker and leader in this field ... Software patents are treated as an asset class that can easily be bought and sold, like a stock or bond. There's a big market for them. And that's a big problem. The acquisition of these assets generally means that the inventor -- the entity that patent laws exist to protect -- is out of the picture, leaving those with big money the ammunition to sue, but perhaps not the ambition to innovate. Patent law is long-overdue for fundamental change.
I don't think this passes economics 101. It's often incredibly hard for an individual inventor to bring their invention to market even with a patent. Freedom to sell or license their patent instead of requiring every inventor to also build a successful startup enhances their incentive to invent and their capability of bringing an invention into the market, in the same way that freedom to sell oil you've extracted from the Earth enhances the incentive to extract oil and increases its availability in the market.
That may be true in other fields, but that argument makes some assumptions about invention and production that don't hold true for software.
First, the notion that production is so expensive that a lone developer cannot realize their idea. This isn't true. Any developer can build and market a product single-handedly, in the majority of niches of the software market.
Secondly, the idea that a patentable idea is born first, and then a product is built based on it. That happens now and then, but it's rare (e.g. RSA patent). The common case is that a developer sets out to build a better mousetrap, delivers a piece of working software, and only afterwards realizes they've had a patentable idea. By that time they also have a marketable product.
