Patents and IP
Passport
- Rock
- Rules
- Depth
- 3 · Drill rig
- Time to dig
- 3–10 years
- Capital
- ● · high
- Solo
- ✗ no
- AI
- ↑ AI-resistant
- Rent
- ✗ not for sale
Essence
A state-granted monopoly on an invention (patents) or hidden know-how (trade secrets): the competitor is legally forbidden, or practically unable, to repeat it. In Dorsey's framework this is half of intangible assets; in the thirteen sampled tags it is not covered at all — there are brands and licences, but no patents.
How it is built
Qualcomm — a patent portfolio as the business model
Qualcomm holds standard-essential patents on cellular communication: they are sewn into the 3G, 4G and 5G standards themselves, and every smartphone manufactured pays a royalty regardless of whose chips are inside. The moat is double — the inventions, plus a seat on the standardisation committees where your patents become mandatory for the whole industry. The long war with Apple ended with Apple paying and signing a licence: you cannot go around the standard without leaving the industry.
Dyson — a patent thicket around the category
Thousands of patents on cyclone technology, motors and construction, plus aggressive litigation against anyone who comes close. A patent moat is rarely a single patent; it is a thicket of overlapping filings that makes going around expensive and legally risky. At its peak it let Dyson hold premium prices in vacuum cleaners — a product category that normally has no moats at all.
Amazon 1-Click — a patent on the obvious, while it lasted
In 1999 Amazon patented one-click purchasing and won against Barnes & Noble, which had to add a second click. For twenty years all of e-commerce either lived with a worse checkout or paid — Apple licensed it. Proof that even a trivial patent is a real moat until it expires.
How it is bypassed
Design-around — engineering past the claims
A patent protects the claims of an invention, not the problem: Dyson's competitors, Shark among them, designed their cyclones differently, survived the litigation and took share on price. The attacker's patent lawyers read the claims as carefully as the defender's lawyers wrote them, and they almost always find a workable design around if the economics justify it.
Expiry and the patent cliff
A patent is a moat with a timer: twenty years and it is over. Pharma lives in that cycle — generics knock 80–90% off the price in the first year after expiry. 1-Click expired in 2017 and one-click purchase instantly became the norm everywhere. Sometimes the attacker only has to prepare and wait.
Weak applicability to software
After Alice v. CLS Bank in 2014, abstract software patents in the United States are invalidated in bulk: a typical SaaS has no patent moat whatsoever. Trade secrets leak with the people who carry them, within the limits contracts can impose, and open source creates prior art that blocks other people's filings. For the world of vibe-coded applications this moat effectively does not exist — which explains its absence from the sample.
Verdict
A real moat in hardware, pharma and standards; in software after Alice, close to empty. It is bypassed by engineering around the claims, by waiting out the expiry, and through gaps between jurisdictions.