> I agree that wholesale copying is an issue. However patents are almost never going to be the appropriate response to that for software companies. With software you can always go for copyright violation and/or misappropriation of trade secrets

Only if software is the product you're selling. I worked at two companies that had patents on software algorithms, but our software was just a reference implementation. Explain to me how a company like ARM would operate relying on just copyright and trade secrets. I think ARM represents a great and valuable business model, and patents enable that business model.

> Instead software patents seem to be mostly used to sue people who independently invented the same thing.

I don't think you can point to any statistic to back this up.