The quickest surefire way to patent reform is by threatening Facebook users that they may have to go back to using Yahoo services. People will be revolting in the streets.
I agree, what could really be any other purpose for patents? Is a judge going to say, 10 years into a patent, "well, our process thought this was novel 10 years ago, but it doesn't seem so novel to me now"?
The problem is that this 20-year term makes no sense in software, if the public wants to use the latest and greatest thing.
And I'll point out that novelty and non-obviousness are two different things in the context of patents. The majority of software patents seem to fail the latter the majority of the time. Novelty is more of a wash.