I like the idea of making sure the inventor gets some portion of royalties. To be honest, it'd probably help my employers too. If that was the case, I'd have d

I like the idea of making sure the inventor gets some portion of royalties. To be honest, it'd probably help my employers too. If that was the case, I'd have dozens of patents under my belt. As is, I see little upside to applying for patents for my employer. My general feeling is that the price of a patent application should grow in some non-linear way with the number of patents. Having a few, targeted, focused patents should be cheap. Google has around 100,000 patents (source: random web site; could be wrong; if it is, swap out for any other big company and big number). For reference: Patent office fees for various services are currently $100-$1000. Legal fees are probably $20k-$100k. The patent examiner has very little time and capacity to do a good job, and there is a resource mismatch. In abstract, an alternative would be a smooth rise in costs along the lines of: - First patent is $50 - Tenth patent is $500 At this point, moving from individual-scale to corporate-scale: - Hundredth patent is $50,000 (so about equal resources to both sides) - Thousandth patent is $200,000 (subsidizing the individual patents) - Ten thousandth patent on is $1M to file In practice, this hides a lot of complexity. I think the biggest problem I can't think for how to solve (suggestions welcome!) is the corporate shell game. Google sets up a thousand subsidiaries, each of which files 100 patents. Perhaps a simpler alternative: - Individual personally filing a patent: $50 - Individual with lawyer / LLC / S-Corp / small business: $5000 - Private C-corp: $50,000 - Public C-Corp: $100k