Sorry, but I would argue that not reading patents relative to your project is practicing negligence. Maybe that gets you out of trebled damages for willful infringement, but it opens you up to other liabilities and is against professional ethics.
Beyond the NCEES, the IEEE Computer Society and ACM jointly publish a code of ethics for software engineering: http://www.computer.org/web/education/code-of-ethics
Even if you're not a member, their code of ethics is similar to every other professional code of ethics I've seen. I don't see what's blurry about it.
Bringing it back to the top of the thread, I think that willful ignorance is a bad recommendation, would not help in a legal situation, would be negligent, and would be contrary to a professional code of ethics. Maybe you feel that a consultant or someone working on areas outside of the safety-critical domain doesn't need to follow a professional code or act in a professional manner? Completely disagree if that is the case.
As far as IEEE-CS and ACM being "obsolete trade associations", agree to disagree. I'm not aware of a better trade organization than those two.
Honestly, I don't understand the backlash against professionalism.