Myhrvold v. Macx
Nathan Myhrvold (former CTO of Microsoft) appears to be stealing a page from Charlie Stross's Manfred Macx stories. Myhrvold's new company, Intellectual Ventures, is brainstorming and patenting ideas, as well as possibly buying up existing patents, to corner the market on the next generation of technology. John Robb has some interesting commentary over at his blog.

In the Macx stories (i.e. Lobsters), the main character files patents and then gives away the technology for free, living purely off the altruism of others. Which is in direct conflict with Myhrvold's strategy. So the question is, how do we shift things more toward Macx and away from Myhrvold? Could this be an open source distributed effort? Creative Commons patents, where you ask a large group of scientists to start filing patents, if they agree not to actually enforce the patents.

How do we hack the U.S. Patent Office? Somebody call the EFF...