Patents are morally reprehensible in principle, the result in practice is therefore inevitable. There is no middle road or way around this: patents must be abolished.
It comes down to whether you think it's moral that one person filing paperwork with a bureaucrat grants him the right to haul other people who independently think the same thing he did into court, trying to take their property. Patents are tantamount to the creation of thought crimes, on a vast scale.
Furthermore, if you aren't against patents in general, there is no principled argument that can be made against software patents in particular. Software is just as inventive as other realms.
