Are the patent wars really worth it?

An article over at the computerworld's UK site conclude that the answer is really no.  Here is a part of their conclusion:

"To summarize, there are a lot of big losers from NPE litigation, while hardly anyone benefits much. The defendant firms and their customers lose while patent holders gain very little by comparison. Even the investors in NPE firms have gained little—these firms barely break even based on their cumulative net income in Table 4. Apparently, the only real beneficiaries are the lawyers and perhaps the principals of the NPE firms.

That's important, because it means whatever gains patents may bring to the business economy - and that's assuming they do bring any, which seems not to be the case for the software world, judging by the figures discussed in “Patent Failure” - most be weighed against the half-trillion-dollar loss in terms of money that could otherwise have been spent on real innovation, rather than on supporting the luxuriant lifestyle of trolls and their lawyers."

So maybe we should just reinvent the whole system.  To do that though we need to not elect Lawyers.  Who may be tempted to protect their friends interests.  They are the ones that run most often though so it seems unlikely that we will get resolution to this situation any time soon.