If you're a mechanical engineer, you can read mechanical patents,

If you're a farmer, you can read farming patents.

See how that works? The language is dense, and you must read carefully, but the patents I have actually read are not particularly difficult to understand.

Here I can bring in a different definition of "can". I could if I wanted browse different software patents, but that just puts me or my company in more legal trouble especially if sometime later I happen to develop something similar enough to a patent I've previously read that I get sued over it. It's not a good idea to just read patents blindly if you have any interest in building stuff that might get popular.

Though I suppose it's probably safe to read the Linked List patent, which is one of the clearest and silliest I've ever seen: http://www.google.com/patents?id=Szh4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...