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Occasionally new enterprise was discouraged by the almost certain prospect of legal complications.

One manufacturer who held an allegedly basic patent said: `` I would readily put over $50,000 into the manufacture of the device, but it is so easy to make that we would enter immediately into a prolonged ordeal of patent litigation which would eat up all our profits ''.

The prevailing view in the industry was summed up in 1912 by a group of auto makers who told a Senate committee: `` The exceedingly unsatisfactory and uselessly expensive conditions, including delays surrounding legal disputes, particularly in patent litigation, are items of industrial burden which must be written large in figures of many millions of dollars of industrial waste ''.