The United States has recently decided that I have the right to patent protection of my intellectual property when that property is software or the design of software. I believe I could use that right to produce 10,000 patents that MegaTech would eventually infringe. My methods are described below, step by step.

1. Do not produce any product. This would be a liability. If you produce a product, MegaTech can threaten you for infringing their patents.
2. Find the repository of all MegaTech bugs. It should list several hundred thousand by now.
   1. For each open bug with an obvious fix, patent solving the problem the bug describes with the obvious fix. This should produce about 50 patents per month. (Ignore hard bugs.)
   2. For each closed bug with an obvious fix where the fix was not described in detail, patent solving the problem the bug describes with the obvious fix. Yes you are allowed to patent features that are already in MegaTech's products, so long as MegaTech has kept the implementation of those features a trade secret. This should produce several thousand patents, possibly passing the 10,000 patent goal right here.
   (Although there is no solution for the open bug problem, MegaTech may be able to solve the closed bug problem by publishing the solution to every bug it fixes.)
3. Get MegaTech's reference manuals and those of its competitors.
   1. For every MegaTech product, for every competitor, make a list of all the features that only that competitor has. Features are often very subtle, indicated only by a sentence trying to justify how some larger feature works. There should be about 100 such features per product per competitor.
   2. For every MegaTech product, for every competitor, produce all pairs of features where one feature comes from MegaTech and the other comes from a competitor. If the two features are not independent, try to figure out how an implementation would handle their interaction. If you have to think longer than ten minutes discard the pair and go on to the next one. This should yield about 5000 pairs per product per competitor.
   3. Make triples of features the same way -- two features from competitors, one from MegaTech. Only bother with 9 triples per pair from the last step.
   4. Write patents. Do 1 independent claim (the pair from step 2) and 9 dependent claims (the 9 triples from step 3) per patent. This is 5000 patents per product per competitor.
   5. Wait for MegaTech to implement a feature.
   (MegaTech may be able to thwart this somewhat by publishing a list of features it intends to implement, namely every feature that anyone has ever heard of and then some.)
4. Get just MegaTech's manuals.
   1. Try to imagine a feature for every sentence in the manual.
   2. Make up an implementation for that feature.
   3. Search the all prior patents for an implementation of that feature. Give up if you find one.
   4. Search MegaTech's publications for an implementation of that feature. Give up if you find one.
   5. Patent your implementation of that feature. It will match MegaTech's implementation about half the time.
   There is no workaround for this short of publishing code.
5. Write a program to implement something involving a recent industry buzzword.
   1. Patent every data structure, as used for that buzzword ("A singly linked list, in the context of a PUSH-oriented Java GUI").
   2. Patent every algorithm (any loop counts as an algorithm, as do most routines) as used for that buzzword.
   3. Patent the data flow, the routine heirarchy, the interface as used for that buzzword.
   4. Hope that MegaTech implements a product for that buzzword.
   This is more work than the previous methods, and causes an infringement less often.
6. Produce a useful new idea, patent it, and hope that MegaTech steals it. This method is clearly inferior to all the previous methods. It requires more work, produces only one patent, and the patent is of something complicated enough that MegaTech can probably solve the same problem differently, and avoid infringment.

Patents are supposed to encourage innovation. But from where I sit, they actually impede innovation. New technologies often prompt new problems with obvious solutions, and patents mean those obvious solutions won't be widely useable until the patent expires 20 years later. This limits the debug cycle of technology to 20 years. This is a bad thing in that it slows down technological advancement, sometimes a lot, but it might be good in that it gives society 20 years to adapt to new technology before the next wave can replace it. For example how we're still using .JPG images in 2021. If the government is intentionally limiting technological advancement this way by continuing to have patents, um, wow, I'm surprised, but well congratulations it works.

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