Pharma patents are nothing like the tech patents. There are many differences which most of you here are unaware of. While there are plenty of greed based abuses by the pharma companies, you have to keep in mind that they are afterall businesses and do need to make money. My wife did a study on the pharma R&D not long ago from multitude of companies and multitude of drugs.
Some drugs and treatments take as much as 20 BILLION USD to complete (although thats the highest end) and entire lifetimes of highly educated professionals who dedicated themselves entirely to the development process.
They also take 10-20 years, and it some rare cases much much more, entire generations.
Can you compare that to the software and tech industry ? What would happen to android and crapple if their stuff took 20 years and 20B$ per feature to develop ?
Also, on many drugs the patents can only be enforced within the 1st 5 or 10 years (dont rememebr exactly), this is to help these companies recoup the initial investment. Often times it takes about a decade before they see 1st positive ROI, not so in the software industry.
Hence pharma and tech patents are not a very good comparison.
I do applaud judge Posner, may there be many more like him, patenting needs to be sorted out and applied where its needed and functional not just because an entity files for it.