Doc Searls is spot on with this, on patenting software and business plans:

It is anti-productive, anti-competitive, anti-market, anti-freedom, anti-liberty and simply wrong for the U.S. (and for any country) to continue instinsting that 1) ways of doing business, and 2) the ever-growing periodic table of natural building materials we call software, should be patentable. They should not. We should write business method and software patent laws out of existence and start watching growth and progress happen all over the place.

After that, maybe we could reform copyright law...