Tech "Guru" Riles the Industry By Seeking Huge Patent Fees

For instance in Blink, he points out that a very successful golf player doesn't even seem to understand the reasons for his success. This has important implications. Do successful people really know why they are successful ? Do we take them a little too seriously ? After all self-improvement is big business.

If the patent couldn't be transferred, wouldn't this mean that only the inventor, personally, was allowed to make the product?

In a word, yes: you, the inventor, have the right to build it. You can also say who else can build it. That was the point of the copyright/patent clause. Here, read it for yourself:

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.

Nowhere does it say anything about Congress being allowed to make laws that enable the purchase of said patents or copyrights. That's unconstitutional -- and if you doubt this, take a gander at the letters that Jefferson and Madison wrote about the issue while they were debating it. Jefferson, for instance, writes:

I like the declaration of rights as far as it goes, but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additons would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose.

Obviously they did not intend for "intellectual property" to develop. If you can't touch it, you can't own it.

More on the Jefferson/Madison correspondence here:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=1...