Wealth & Money Quote by Larry Wall

Larry Wall’s line lands like an engineer’s deadpan punchline: the patent system isn’t merely expensive, it’s priced. The surface complaint is procedural - filing fees, lawyers, the time sink of paperwork. The subtext is more cutting: intellectual property law claims to protect inventors, yet it quietly rewards the actors already insulated by capital, legal departments, and risk tolerance. “Large corporation” isn’t just a category here; it’s a machine built to metabolize bureaucracy. “An individual like me” is a reminder that creativity often starts as a one-person shop - and that the system treats that origin story as a rounding error.

Wall, best known in programming circles, speaks from a world where innovation is iterative, collaborative, and frequently informal: people riff on each other’s ideas, improve tools in public, ship fixes fast. Patents invert that culture. They turn ideas into land claims, backed not by technical merit but by the ability to finance registration and enforcement. The quote’s power comes from its plainness: he doesn’t moralize, he itemizes. The injustice is embedded in the verb “afford,” as if patent protection were a luxury good rather than a public promise.

Context matters: in software, where a “new” idea can be a recombination of known patterns, patents can become less about rewarding invention than about stockpiling leverage. Wall is pointing to a structural asymmetry - and doing it in a way that makes the system sound exactly as petty and transactional as it often is.