Inventing something doesn’t necessarily mean you were the first to come up with it.
First, you must navigate the prohibitively time-consuming and expensive process to secure a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Just searching to see if an idea has been taken might entail watching a 38-minute tutorial. If that’s not soul-crushing enough, legal fees and associated costs can run tens of thousands of dollars. That means the quest to nab a patent is over before it begins for many people. “Under-resourced, low-income people, they just are not able to get this legal assistance,” says Anna Bakhmetyeva, assistant director of the intellectual property
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