Patents can be somewhat effective for vertical market software sold by companies operating in countries with effective rule of law. But for horizontal or consumer software the pirates and cloners can operate servers in other shithole countries beyond the reach of law enforcement. We'll probably see more political pressure to respond to that with widespread IP address blocks at national borders. Eventually every country may have some variant of "The Great Firewall of China". (I don't think that's a good thing, just stating that it's likely to become more prevalent.)