There's an actionable difference between pharma and most other things. Property rights should "give notice" of the boundaries of a property, most obviously you lose certain rights if you fail to mark the edge of real property with a fence or something.
But for most patents there's no realistic way to find patents you might be infringing (for software this is impossible in the general case as a corollary of Fines theorem). That's why we hate patents so much: you only find out if there is a patent if you get sued.
But for pharma there is a way; chemicals are "indexable": because a standard mapping from chemical structure to names exists, if you are using a chemical and want to find whether anyone patented it, you can do so easily.
In an ideal world, the law would recognise this and patents would only be valid in areas where there is a natural way of indexing - which is pretty much only pharma AFAICT
But for most patents there's no realistic way to find patents you might be infringing (for software this is impossible in the general case as a corollary of Fines theorem). That's why we hate patents so much: you only find out if there is a patent if you get sued.
But for pharma there is a way; chemicals are "indexable": because a standard mapping from chemical structure to names exists, if you are using a chemical and want to find whether anyone patented it, you can do so easily.
In an ideal world, the law would recognise this and patents would only be valid in areas where there is a natural way of indexing - which is pretty much only pharma AFAICT