Screw the lawyers and MBAs, engineers can put a stop to this if we want to, all it takes is having the courage of your convictions. You'll probably have many jobs over your career but a patent is a landmine that will be dangerous for 20 years, you don't know when it will come back to bite you. They can't force you to write a patent, you can always get another job.
Until software patents are killed off what we probably need is an organization something like the EFF or the Creative Commons (sorta) which could pool those patents to be used as defences against future attempts to patent software.
Not sure at all if there is a legal framework under which such an organization could exist.
The widespread abuse of patents has IMO flipped the original rationale for having them (to promote the progress of Science and useful Arts) into tools that discourage innovation and experimentation.
1) They last a VERY long time as measured in "Internet time"
2) It's very hard to find examples of GOOD software patents. They tend to either cover too much (one click shopping), or they are really just math expressed in code (encryption and compression algorithms).
3) They are easy to abuse, since it takes so little time to produce them and the people who grant them don't really understand them.
That's one of the significant problems with (software) patents. Someone who thinks an idea is novel gets a patent on it and uses it to attack people who knew it wasn't.
If there's anyone on the planet who finds an idea obvious, it shouldn't be patented.
Not if the invention is published or otherwise disclosed in any other form. You don't have to claim ownership of an idea to keep someone else from patenting it.