It's this sort of attitude, "well, it's the lawyers' fault, you can't blame the engineers" that helps enable this sort of garbage. Yes, you absolutely can blame the engineers. They choose to work at IBM and choose to stay there even after they learned about the patent happy nature of the company. Same goes for every other patent happy company. You can't continue to patent everything under the sun if you don't have engineers finding it for you. "Just following orders" hasn't been a good excuse longer than software has been a significant field.