ABSTRACT

Because of their common layout, all patents tend to look the same whether they are incredibly valuable or absolutely worthless. The scrawniest patent with just a few pages and a couple of mundane figures could be an absolute bonanza, while the 100-page behemoth with dozens of intricate apparatus figures, fancy flow diagrams, impressive equations, and a hundred claims can be worth less than the paper on which it is printed. All patents are spherical when you look at their surface features only (Figure 3.1).