They're going to kill innovation if they keep going. However, there is a glimmer of hope, a bastion of light that towers higher than the clouds these patent battles have created. It's called prior art.
Until recently, prior art didn't really mean you could overturn a patent. It was more along the lines of "So... you drew something recently that is a copy of an existing patent and put the year of 1998 on it". Now, prior art, assuming it's valid, is completely legal evidence that CAN be used to overturn bad patents. A bad patent generally refers to a patent on something that shouldn't really be patentable, or a patent that the person who patented it doesn't actually own, or people patenting things they never intend to actually use.
http://patents.stackexchange.com/ is where you'd need to submit questions about a particular patent, and it's backed by the US Patent Office and available to everyone.
"Patent trolling" as it's commonly known has become so rampant that people are afraid of innovation for fear that it might infringe upon something that already exists. The cost for defending against a patent troll are very high, some $1M USD even before a case. By doing what we can to eliminate this, design will flourish and innovation will only improve.