The internet is global, legal jurisdictions are national. If the business risk of infringing patents becomes too high in the US, it creates an incentive for companies doing business online to move legal jurisdictions, or for other countries to offer incentives to internet based companies by guaranteeing that they will not support software patents. Presumably at that point pressure for patent reform in the US would increase, but by then it may not matter.
In a different context, favorable regulations are one reason that e.g. The City (i.e., financial district on London) is a global financial hub.
If you wish to do business in the USA, you cannot ignore US patent law. Therefore moving out of the US is a hardship for you with absolutely no potential upside.
Fortunately for many people, the US is not the only country.
Millions of companies survive and thrive without doing business in the US. At this time in history, we are used to thinking of the US as being a favorable business climate; relatively free of corruption with clear rules and low cost of business formation. It is clear that unless current trends are reversed that this will not remain the case.
If the governments of the countries of Northern Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Morocco) were to form a regional economic initiative that created those conditions from the Suez Canal to the Atlantic Coast and created a clean Intellectual Property regime with automatic licensing they would attract a decent share of global technology investment if they could make it stick.
Automatic licensing in this context being the rule that no one can deny another the use of an invention, but proven priority and disclosure grants an automatic share of the license collected out of the VAT or other tax on finished goods.
Automatic licensing sounds like a very interesting way to balance IP creator interests with IP consumer interests.
Extend the same principle to copyright: Hollywood can't refuse to sell me a movie just because I don't live in a certain geographical area, and RIAA can't deny YouTube users the right to cover and remix their music as long as a reasonable fee is collected by some other means, whether privately or via a public distribution scheme.
Perhaps the law should define a nominal amount per work that relieves the payer of all IP-related liability. The amount could depend on the type of work, and/or proportional to the profit generated, so that hobbyists who only copy stuff for personal use pay at the lowest bracket and people who make a lot of money out of other people's IP pay more, just like taxes.
See the recent kerfuffle about online gambling domain name seizures. If something is deemed illegal for US consumers, the DOJ works pretty hard to shut it down regardless of jurisdiction - although if I recall correctly, one of the triggers for seizure in the online gambling case was that the sites were clearly marketed as catering for the US consumer.
In a different context, favorable regulations are one reason that e.g. The City (i.e., financial district on London) is a global financial hub.