In the fast-moving world of modern software, patents provide developers with a valuable defence against the theft of their ideasMore than this however, they are used as streams of revenue for small innovative businesses, and big bullying sticks for the big corporations. 

  Companies or individuals can register a patent for a particular invention, whether that invention be a physical object or simply a way of doing things that is considered particularly originalIn this way they are different from a 'copyright', which would only apply to a specific workThis broadness of their nature makes them a very tricky customer in the world of law(craft), and lawsuits for the infringement of a patent are far more common than the relatively easily avoidable 'copyright' lawsuits

In fact, in the software industry, it is often said that it is impossible to write any piece of software without infringing a patent somewhere  Due to the nature of the technology they generally apply to, the lifetime of a patent is much less than that of a copyrightThey can apply to almost everything and there are thousands of patents relevant to gaming today

They cover everything from the hardware of the various consoles, the software that runs on them, right up to the very ideas behind games  The big names in computer gaming today each own hundreds of patentsThey continually licence out, either to each other or to smaller firms (if they can afford the fee) like one big, legalistic group-hug.

 There are also a plethora of smaller companies whose efforts would otherwise have been forgotten had they not patented an idea that would turn out to be essential to the industry, and which would then sit in the corner like a proverbial golden hen, shitting them out billions.