This might be a place to start, but I could see it evolving (with donations from programmers and the tech industry) into an organization that can hire some full-time lawyers, so it can challenge some of these patent cases where they begin with the small businesses instead of letting them build up steam.

The theory would be to substantially influence the companies that can more or less directly dictate policy to the politicians in DC. Companies like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, Facebook, Apple and so on have the ability to massively influence DC thinking.

If that group, in a united front, decided they wanted to do away with software patents, that's the direction DC would head accordingly.

The bargaining power of a union would be that eg Microsoft would lose its talent and would rot accordingly, if the best engineers refused to go to work for them.

Bill Gates circa 1998, asked about starting over from scratch and his thoughts on that concept, responds in part by noting that Microsoft's success could be dramatically altered by removing just perhaps 30 people (and the follow-on talent that would want to leave with those people):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldPh0_zEykU&feature=player_de...

Microsoft is a bigger beast today, in terms of employees (by a factor of roughly four fold), but he's probably spot on that you can dramatically alter the course of a software company such as Microsoft by removing some key talent pillars.