The recently settled lawsuit involving BlackBerry - which nearly blackened the popular handheld's screens across America - should be a wake-up call for Americans to tackle the crisis in their patent system.

The BlackBerry case captured, in one courtroom, the perfect storm of forces that are battering US innovation: poor quality patents that are exploited by entrepreneurial lawyers to extort large settlements from companies that sometimes pay hundreds of millions of dollars just to get these "patent trolls" off their backs.