Patents are not hell.
If you move outside the online sphere, and into all the vital big industries; medico, bluechip, machine, nano, automotive, aerospace etc - you will see that patents are a necessary evil for anything to function properly.

You should endorse patents, because without them, all the independent and small entrepreneurs will die. Intellectual Property is the only leverage a small tech entrepreneur has when he faces the big corporates, and if he is not able to protect his technologies, the corporates can just use the one tool they have that the entrepreneurs do not - endless sums of money.

Patents are the foundation of tech entrepreneurship, and without them, all tech development would happen within corporations, because there would be no incentive for the entrepreneurs to give it a go. They would have NOTHING.
 

Don Dodge's (MS) perspective on "Patent Lunacy":

http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/02/don_dodge_daily.html