We don't have "software patents," since software (as code) isn't patentable subject matter. Instead, we have "business method patents," which cover the systems and methods used by the software in conjunction with an operating environment that are putatively novel, non-obvious, unique, and enabled.<p>I'd imagine most people fall into two camps: (1) business methods shouldn't be patentable subject matter solely because they satisfy the machine-or-transformation test (as articulated in a trilogy of cases from the 1970s and most recent in Bilski); and (2) even if they should be, many of the business methods today fail on non-obviousness grounds.<p>Proscribing the issuance of 'software patents' <i>isn't</i> the problem. The problem is that in this digital age, we're relying on the machine-or-transformation test for business practices that exist in the virtual world. Because of the prevalence and impact of the internet in the global marketplace, there's now a fundamental difference between a ROM chip in a device containing instructions interpreted by a microprocessor and a software program compiled into machine readable code stored in RAM and processed by your computer's CPU.