As a design engineer, at my main job I often have to waste a lot of useful time searching and double checking if a certain topology or circuit implementation was not patented by some nerd even ever being used, just to avoid possible issues. Often we had to go around a straight, fair solution without using that just because a patent was issued to someone on that. Honestly speaking, in every field, not only electronics or software, there is a limited number of possible solutions for a given situation, task or problem, which will give optimum and efficient result. And most of them are patented. So, we can't use them. I'm not talking about paying them the right of usage, that will wipe us and 80% of the companies out of the market. We already use some IC's for which we pay royalty fee, which is something like 40-60% of it's total cost. More than half of the price in some cases. The most notable case was of a finished product which we had to recall just because we discovered that someone had filled a patent on a part of the circuit which was dealing with a redundant protection. We had to recall over one thousands of units, make some "minor" changes certify again, and resell. We lost several weeks for that, and xxxx$. At the time when the product was designed, there was no patent for that circuit, and we still suspect that some of he stuff sold the idea to someone who filled the patent. Without proves, cannot do nothing.
Thus in my opinion the current patent system is against technical progress, but very a very useful tool for opportunism companies which seek a fast and easy way to get rich. See the countless numbers of $hitty companies, obscure, which fill a patent on something irrelevant then when a big company will use somewhere in a famous product, just sue them and ask for billions. recent case, Proview, some no-name chinese company sued Apple for iPad name. In fact they are bankrupted and that was the last desperate move to prevent sinking. But asking billions, is out of good sense or imagination. I wonder why somebody who perhaps patented the colors, haven't sued Apple yet for using white, silver and black colors on their products. Or the size, maybe someone has patented a shoe box with the same size as iPad, and must sue them for using his magical size.
Kodak was bankrupted too and in the past few years relied only on it's patents on digital imaging. And the examples can continue forever.