But Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.
They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device; attempting to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android (which we provide free of charge) than Windows Phone 7; and even suing Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it.
A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a “tax” for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation.
Google's recent acquisition of Motorola has been largely thought to be a move for Google to prepare for a drawn of battle of attrition -- currently their patent portfolio has been limited to a few hundred, while Microsoft and Apple's portfolios number in the tens of thousands, with thousands more currently in the queue to be either approved or rejected.
Much of what this whole patent arms race is illustrating is a large set of major flaws in the US patent system (which in turn affects international companies, in turn affecting the rest of the world) -- the patent office gets spammed constantly with so many applications, it is approving applications that are ambiguous, or in some cases possibly contradict previously approved patents. All of these companies, open source software implementations like Linux, and thousands of smaller-scale independent software companies are all violating multiple patents in their work at this point -- essentially this means that if you make software or come up with a process, you can be sued at almost any time, and lose, for pretty much no practical reason except to allow the plaintiff to make money. So widespread is this problem that there are entire organisations dedicated to making their bread and butter by suing people.
So, how would you people propose the problem be dealt with?
Personally I'm of the (callously idealistic) opinion that software and process patents just shouldn't exist. They shouldn't be given a shorter lifetime, or have a more stringent review process, they should just not exist. At this point in time, the patent system does not favour the interests of the most innovative, it just favours the interests of the most wealthy, which completely misses the point of the patent system. At the very least, the current set of current approved patents should be given a major pruning if not just tossed out the window altogether.
If you've got a good idea, it should be practically expected that people are going to copy it. In the end, this gives a net benefit to everyone. If you want to protect your idea, a patent at this point won't really help because it's probably already been filed for by someone else who had zero intention of creating a product from it anyway. The smart thing to do is just play your cards close to your chest and push your idea as hard as you can to make it known that you were first on the scene with it.
wow.... this is another reason why this country makes me mad.... Everything is always about money this and money that, and nothing about quality anymore. Monopolies are illegal but the patents are like holding a monopoly over a single product. 
