[Smedley]

FYI, I am a patent attorney. Patent rights are intellectual property, and as property they can be freely assigned, bought, sold or given away.

“Patent trolls” are often individual inventors or small companies who try to monetize their creations, but are overwhelmed by the financial might of big corporations who steal the ideas of others without shame.

Regardless, there is a right for people to buy commodities and reap the financial benefits whether the commodity be stock, bond, patent, deed, futures or whatever.

[The_Reader_David]

Not surprisingly, given that you are a patent attorney, you have correctly described the state of the law. However, there are serious questions as to whether the reification as property of state granted monopolies, which are what copyright and patents have always been since the Law of Queen Anne and the Statute on Monopolies of 1648, the British laws the Founders had in mind when they gave Congress the right "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,"

• is actually constitutional under a strict construction of the Constitution
• serves the purpose of promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts"
• is good policy
• is morally coherent: whatever courts and lawyers may hold, are state granted monopoly rights actually property?

I would suggest that the reification of copyrights and patents as "intellectual property" fails on all four counts, and that reigning in patent trolls, while it is against your own guild interests as a patent lawyer, is good policy, and a good place to start in putting these state-granted monopolies back into constraints originally envisioned by the Founders.

[indthkr]

"Patent rights..."

...and are Constitutional Rights, just to be specific.