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Halfway through The Little Prince, the pint-sized planet hopper meets a businessman who is so busy counting the stars that he cannot spare a moment to talk. His count is at 501,622,731, and accuracy is important because he owns them all—every last star in the sky. The businessman has no real use for them, of course; he just writes down their numbers on a piece of paper. When the prince asks how anyone can possibly own the stars, the businessman responds, "They belong to me because I was the first person to think of it."

One can only assume that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's businessman makes money by getting his lawyers to sue anyone who tries to put the stars to some useful purpose. This would make him the prototypical patent pirate, or patent troll, as they are sometimes called. These are "technology companies" that produce nothing but lawsuits. Typically, they buy up as many patents as they can, often from defunct or bankrupt companies, and then seek out successful companies to sue for infringement.

Take Apple: In the past year alone, it has been sued over iTunes, the iPod and its Time Machine back-up system. Most recently, it's been slapped with lawsuits over the iPhone's touchscreen keyboard and visual voice-mail systems—plus the whole concept of the iPhone itself. Patent pirates are a problem for any company looking to innovate today, but the situation is particularly acute when it comes to software. A flood of patents granted to overly broad, trivial and vague software "innovations" has created a situation where literally any company involved with technology can be dragged into court on an infringement claim. Companies such as Kellogg's, Sears and Encyclopedia Britannica have been sued for merely displaying images on their websites. For real innovators like Apple and Google, it's even more absurd—every move they make seems to result in a lawsuit.

It's clear that the entire patent system in the U.S. needs to be overhauled—and that the very notion of software patents should be abolished. According to End Software Patents (ESP), a patent reform advocacy group, if all your company does is operate a website, you could be infringing on more than 4,300 patents. If you sell a product or service through your website, that number jumps to over 11,000. Keep in mind that it doesn't matter if you've invented every process on your website from scratch; nor does it matter if the patent holder has never made any attempt to implement the idea outlined by their patent—independent invention or ignorance of existing patents is no defence in an infringement claim. Add it all up, and ESP says that the cost of defending against software-related infringement claims has risen to more than $11 billion (U.S.) a year.

Patents were meant to spur innovation by rewarding inventors for taking the risks and absorbing the costs involved in the invention process. But there's little evidence that greater patent protection has led to increases in innovation. In 1999, Harvard finance professor Josh Lerner looked at patent practices in 60 countries over a period of 150 years. His conclusion? There's no correlation between strong patent laws and increased innovation.

In emerging industries, in particular, where basic innovations are still happening, patents can be particularly destructive. It's probably quite fortunate that for many years after the dawn of the computer industry, software patents didn't exist. Software was viewed as an expression of mathematics, or simple instructions, both of which traditionally fall outside of patent law. It wasn't until the early 1980s in the U.S., and 1984 in Canada, as the software industry began to grow and amass power, that administrative decisions in the patent offices of both countries started to allow innovations in software to be protected. This change in legal status was not welcomed by many industry leaders. In 1991, Bill Gates even wrote a memo to his management team that stated: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented...the industry would be at a complete standstill today."

Times change, of course, and once the software patent floodgates opened, Microsoft jumped in with everyone else. Today, the company files more than 3,000 patents a year. Apple and Google, too, have filed thousands of applications. Most of the time, these organizations use their patents solely for defence—if another tech company sues them for infringement, chances are they can launch a countersuit. Patents are sort of like nuclear weapons in that way: You have to have them because your enemies do. (Of course, this strategy isn't that effective against patent pirates, because they have nothing worth bombing.)

A perfect example of how patents hold back emerging industries comes from the dawn of aviation. In 1906, the Wright brothers were granted a patent covering the basics of how a plane is controlled. This forced everyone else working on flying machines to pay royalties to the Wrights. Collecting fees and suing people quickly became the brothers' primary occupation—so much so that they stopped innovating and were seen by many as holding back advances in aviation. When the First World War broke out, the fledgling U.S. industry was in such a shambles that there was no reliable American aircraft that could be used in the conflict. The Europeans, meanwhile, were gleefully ignoring the Wrights' patents, so French planes dominated the wartime skies.

In 1917, the U.S. government forced an end to the Wrights' monopoly, and U.S. aircraft design took off. When the Second World War started, U.S. planes were once again state of the art. Especially impressive was a Lockheed dive bomber called the P-38 Lightning. Alas, in 1944, a year after Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince, the French author-cum-aviator was flying a P-38 from Corsica to France when he was shot down and killed.