1) There can be no doctrine to protect ideas, because any sufficiently complex software system to be marketable also relies on so many different ideas that the cost of licensing patents to enter the market is prohibitive. See for example the mobile OS market, which is effectively inaccessible for new players right now unless they have a billion-dollar bankroll.
Your example of cryptography is a bad one, because those ideas are usually developed in educational environments, funded by tax dollars. For those rare classes of software where the idea really is non-obvious and takes a large time to develop, government can provide the necessary funding to develop it, without the other 98% of software having to suffer under a restrictive patent system.
2) The current system is flawed conceptually, we don't need a software patent system, never did. It's a myth, and there's no cost/benefit analysis that ever proved it as anything else. We don't need a patent system for many other classes of invention also. In most industries it's a net negative, not much more than a tax on doing business.
3) Whether or not software is like making art has nothing to do with the legal situation. If the laws covering art are even worse than the laws covering technological invention then those laws need to change as well. That copyright has been misappropriated to the degree that it has is not something you solve by making less subject matter copyrightable, but by fixing the law.
1) There can be no doctrine to protect ideas, because any sufficiently complex software system to be marketable also relies on so many different ideas that the cost of licensing patents to enter the market is prohibitive. See for example the mobile OS market, which is effectively inaccessible for new players right now unless they have a billion-dollar bankroll.
Your example of cryptography is a bad one, because those ideas are usually developed in educational environments, funded by tax dollars. For those rare classes of software where the idea really is non-obvious and takes a large time to develop, government can provide the necessary funding to develop it, without the other 98% of software having to suffer under a restrictive patent system.
2) The current system is flawed conceptually, we don't need a software patent system, never did. It's a myth, and there's no cost/benefit analysis that ever proved it as anything else. We don't need a patent system for many other classes of invention also. In most industries it's a net negative, not much more than a tax on doing business.
3) Whether or not software is like making art has nothing to do with the legal situation. If the laws covering art are even worse than the laws covering technological invention then those laws need to change as well. That copyright has been misappropriated to the degree that it has is not something you solve by making less subject matter copyrightable, but by fixing the law.