I disagree with the judge wholeheartedly.
Protection of works should be allowed.
The judge has only shown he has probably never created anything new, interesting and highly original in his life.
Big Pharma might take years to develop a drug etc and then want to reap the rewards of it - but just because a good idea can come a long in a heartbeat - it doesn't mean that the person with the idea should have any less chance to reap the same awards.
These last few weeks of patent news have been incredible to watch - as a creative across range of media and industries I can tell you that when someone copies your ideas, steals your original work or tries to piggy back off things you have created - it only serves to devalue your original work, to water it down - you have less and less chance of reaping any sort of reward because you have nothing to be unique about and there is always someone willing to rip you off and do it virtually for free.
Protection of original work and ideas is necessary.
Very good post.
Unfortunately, this is where the confusion lies. I think we all agree that protection of original work is important (and this is what the copyright does). Imagine that you have invented a new, very confortable chair. This is your original work and its only fair that you profit from it. This is why the patent system was created in the first place.
But software patents and ideas are of a different kind. Software ideas are not products, they are highly abstract *methods* which can be used to create new products. Here, it is again important to differentiate. Some of these methods are highly specialized, say, speech recognition. If you write a software based on this method, you don't have to disclose the method itself. Also, one could argue that this specialized algorithm is your software/product and should be protected. But if your idea is very generic (say, a sorting algorithm or a patent like 'drawing an image on a screen'), its a whole different thing. You can't make a product solely out of this idea. You can use this idea to make new products or improve existing products, anyways - this is an idea everybody could profit from. Do you know how often I have been reinventing some sort of algorithms while programming? So its a bit absurd to say that someone 'owns' an idea like that.
That is my proposal, more or less: make products (or algorithm which define the products) protectable. But more general ideas, which can be applied in a whole range of products of different kinds, should not be patentable.