Anyone in the startup world can tell you an idea is not worth that much, what matters is execution. Patents are supposed to reward the lazy dreamers over the hard working entrepreneurs, though in reality they reward the giant corp with the best legal strategy.
Patents (at least as understood by the US founding fathers who put them in the Constitution, YMMV in other countries) are supposed to be a means by which we all benefit from knowledge that would otherwise be kept a trade secret by their inventors. The nearly two decade long protection is the price we pay for that knowledge.
Of course, looking at it this way, it is absolutely insane that things like "bounce scrolling" are patent protected. Even in situations where some piece of software functionality is 100% new (which basically never happens anyway), if I can watch a video on YouTube of someone interacting with the product and then write a 20 line function that simulates the behavior I saw without ever having seen the original code, nor even having touched the original product myself and that 20 line function can be a patent violation, the patent system is already 100% completely fucked up relative to what it was designed to do originally.
