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Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Constitution at least seems to side with innovation, not openness. Constitution article 1 section 8 says Congress shall have power

"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"

This says nothing about publication, only about progress and exclusivity.

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It doesn’t say anything about selling patents to third parties to abuse either. It specifies authors and inventors, and rights to their writings and discoveries. At what point does it extend those rights to a random unaffiliated attorney or corporation that engages in zero productive innovation or authorship? I agree that the argument your replying to is flawed, none of this applies to Ticketmaster here specifically, but the contemporary system absolutely is broken in several ways that were seemingly never intended by its original codification.

I would support patents that could only ever belong to the actual inventor.

That’s short-sighted because it misses the fact that inventors are often not product people. There’s a big difference between creating something new and bringing it to market.

The big benefit of a functioning patent system is it allows people to make money just inventing things.

This group seems to have a “throw the baby out with the bath water” mentality when it comes to patents simply because of patent trolls, when the obvious solution is to just fix patent approval/litigation.

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