So even if a lone inventor has a legitimate patent claim, a large company can sue and force the person into bankruptcy.
In one recent session to debate a particularly thorny dispute over patent rules, a lone American delegate was swamped by representatives of Brazil, India, Kenya and Zimbabwe, who did not share the American perspective.
Patents legendarily protect the lone inventor, the pioneering genius in a garage, against the predation of big companies.
Those lone inventors are out there nonetheless, dreaming of the patent that will make them rich, and they are a familiar species of fraud victim.
Group invention does not bring the spectacular rewards such as enriched lone prospectors like Pupin, Sperry, and Edison, for all patents are taken out in the name of the company, which expresses its pleasure in good work by increases in salary cheques.
The lone inventor whose Yankee ingenuity enables him to build and patent a better mousetrap is a stock American hero.
The America Invents Act, signed into law last September, did much to encourage lone inventors with limited resources, but left intact some of the more egregious patent practices that hobble innovation in America (see "Programmed nonsense", October 7th 2011).
The United States patent system is designed for the independent inventor — for the person whom Nikola Tesla described as "the lone worker who follows the fleeting inspiration of a moment and finally does something that has not been done before".
But the patent system, together with the law that has accrued around it, still rests on the eighteenth-century idea of the inventor, and in court a lone inventor with a patent is a formidable opponent for any corporation to face.
