The entire patent system is fucked. Originally it was designed to protect inventors and disallow huge corporations from selling an identical product to one you invented and benefiting from their size. The major catch was you could only patent tangible things, and exact designs. These days there are mostly patents for extra vague obscure ideas and concepts. It's no longer a company patenting an exact phone, it's them patenting things like gestures, or "slide to unlock" or multi-touch. Apple actually has a patent for Undervolting. THEY HAVE A PATENT ON A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT. Think about that.
There hasn't really been any work done on patents/copyright/IP etc for a long while, other than the continual creep of laws pushed by the various guilds.
SOPA/ACTA/etc were there to combat very real problems, however I'd argue (and no doubt people here would agree) that they were not the right solution, and that the problem doesn't perhaps need that type of solution.
Intellectual property rights exist so that we can have professional artists and creators - that is both the long and the short of it. They were not created to support a rights industry - MPAA etc. The MPAA are supposed to be the agents of the artists and what is good for them is good for the artist, it's not the case in most circumstances. For as long as there has been mass media there have been large corporations who make the lions share of the profit.
Sadly the way politicians work in the US, UK and EU (where the majority of rights are determined) it's political suicide to go against the large corporations, unless it's a very big issue at the heart of what the public want.
My argument would be that all forms of IP, be it a patent, literature, art etc are products of society at large, and while it's desirable to support professional artists everything that is released for a profit should eventually land in the public domain. That's actually the way the law works at present, if you can see past the way in which it has been utterly perverted. The law though needs to be cut back to the original premise.
IP needs to have a finite limit on it - different things need different limits. The artist (or agents of) need time to monetise their creation, however that time should expire. I'd suggest limits of perhaps 7 years for film/music pharmaceutical patents, 5 years for human interface or software.
There are obvious exceptions to this. For example a company that invests a great deal of time into research which it could not monetise with current technology, it is not fair for them to be unable to monetise it.
However these things could be agreed on an international level. They will not of course though, not unless the public are screaming for it, because the big corporations will lobby strongly against it.
You are almost funny 
