[gord]

Actually, there may be a moral responsibility on all of us developers/hackers to make it obvious to the general public how ridiculous most sw patents are.

For example, we could apply machine learning / data mining to categorise patents so that we can say patent N, M and L are 95% equivalent in some well defined sense.

ie. we could fight back with firm data which ridicules the Patent system into revamp or obsolescence.

[semiquaver]

Listen to the this american life story, they mention a piece of software used by patent lawyers which does basically that.