Inventors Beware!

If some promotion firm says it'll make you millions, odds are it won't

So you have built the better mousetrap--the world's best mousetrap, you think. But the world hasn't seemed to have got the message and isn't exactly beating a path to your door. What to do?

The answer comes often late at night in the middle of a cable-TV show or sometimes on the back of a magazine. For a few hundred dollars, you are told, an invention-promotion company will evaluate your invention, research the patent to see whether anyone else had the idea first, and then contact manufacturers on your behalf. With one good idea, the ads say, you could be sitting...

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