You beat me to it. David K. Levine is a highly regarded economist and game theorist. Boldwin and Levine state that Watt, like many inventors who obtain patents

You beat me to it. David K. Levine is a highly regarded economist and game theorist. Boldwin and Levine state that Watt, like many inventors who obtain patents for inventions that were conceived by several people around the same time, was able to take advantage of the legal system because he was well connected. Watts' case illustrates a pattern that was to repeat itself endlessly: a moneyed inventor makes a minor modification to an existing design, and deploys his superior legal and financial resources to obtain a patent. Nice work if you can get it. James Watt spent more than half of his time litigating against other inventors with superior steam engine designs while he held the patent. When Watts' patent expired, he went into business consulting on steam engine operation--a business model similar to open source software consulting today. Marconi had the legal and financial resources to wrest the patent for radio from Tesla. Marconi's innovation was the addition of a ground wire. Tesla was posthumously awarded the patent by the US Supreme Court when Marconi's company sued the United States for the wartime use of radio.