Patents gone haywire

I posted on intellectual property rights perhaps being too strong a short while back. I just saw a related story today.

Now I don't know squat about this and don't want to investigate the technicalities, but apparently a "buy it now" button on ebay is under dispute in a patent lawsuit. My question: Why on earth should anybody be able to patent a "buy it now" button and why should this be in the court system? How many highly trained and expensive lawyers are wasting their lives on the "buy-it-now button" case that has been in courts for years?