I'm excited for the software industry by any development that loosens patent rights. However, I am also concerned for medicine and other capital-intense industries that need strong patent laws to make innovation worthwhile. Why can't we have separate patent laws for separate industries? If our goal is "to encourage the useful arts", then this makes perfect sense.

Basically, an inventor needs an expected value return of X to have the incentive to invent, where X is the amount that invention costs (including opportunity costs). X is billions of dollars in pharma and only a few thousand in software.

Look which companies line up on different sides of any patent debate. It's informative.