Inventors with limited capital face a mathematically negative return on their patents, regardless of how brilliant their invention is.
April 25, 2026
Original Paper
The Patent Trap A Historical and Formal Analysis of Why the Patent System Fails Its Inventors
SSRN · 6641059
The Takeaway
The patent system contains a wealth ceiling that effectively filters out poor inventors from the marketplace. Pursuing a patent costs more in legal fees and maintenance than the expected value it generates for someone without deep pockets. This structural flaw means that the legal protections intended to reward genius actually favor those who already have wealth. The system does not incentivize innovation as much as it preserves the dominance of established players. Many valuable ideas are lost or abandoned because the cost of protection is too high. A patent is a liability for the poor but an asset for the rich.
From the abstract
This paper advances a historical and formal argument that the contemporary patent system does not, in general, help the inventor who creates the invention it is asked to protect. The argument is framed in terms of the Patent Trap: three interlocking structural constraintspre-filing solvency, maintenance solvency, and enforcement capacity-that together determine whether a given inventor can extract positive expected value from a granted patent. Eight historical case studies spanning 1871-2018 (Sw