An inventor with less than a specific amount of cash in the bank will almost certainly lose money by filing a patent.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
The Patent Trap A Historical and Formal Analysis of Why the Patent System Fails Its Inventors
SSRN · 6644230
The Takeaway
The patent system contains a Wealth Ceiling that makes legal protection a net loss for the poor. People often view patents as a way for a lone genius to protect their invention from big corporations. In reality, the high cost of maintenance and legal defense ensures that only wealthy individuals see a positive return. Inventors below the capital threshold are essentially walking into a trap that drains their resources. This system effectively excludes the very people it was designed to reward.
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 constraints — pre-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 1871–201