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Many people believe that an inventor receives a patent for a tangible invention, the physically constructed item she has created. A patent can be granted on the complete idea of the invention, as described in the patent document. Nevertheless, the intuition that there is some relationship between what the inventor created and what the patent protects is correct. The patent generally protects what the inventor had in her possession when she filed her patent application. The law, however, affords greater protection under the doctrine of equivalents: even if the device accused of infringing the patent is not exactly the same as what the inventor possessed, the device will still infringe if it is insubstantially different. While this makes sense on its face, the current law has created an odd paradox: the doctrine of equivalents primarily protects later-developed technologies, which are by definition things the inventor did not …