Patent

They're a kind of leather shoe.

They're also legally binding ideas, written on paper and/or electronic bits 'n' bytes.

You file for a patent. It takes $10k, $50k, maybe $100k or more to fully establish that patent. But then, when somebody infringes upon it, you wait for them to make lots of money. And then you have their lawyer shake hands with them with palm facing up.

Patents are a kind of intellectual real estate that our laws protect. And for good reason. If we didn't protect intellectual property, few would be incentivized to come up with great ideas, and/or other countries would just steal our ideas and make their own products off the backs of our armies of PhDs slaving away in grad schools and labs around the country, trying to make the world a better place.