There are several key phrases there.

"To promote the Progress"

"for limited Times"

"to Authors and Inventors"

and of course "the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

But you omitted the operative language from the enumerated powers clause itself: "The Congress shall have Power to".

That's a grant of power, but not an obligation to act on that power.

Which is to say:

I've heard people claim that Congress must enact copyright and patent laws. No, Congress has at its discretion the ability to do so.

That those laws be to promote science (writing) and arts (technology). Which would seem to render any _retrospective* extension of the acts as unconstitutional, as well as any execution of the powers (say, by overly-broad grants of low-quality patents).

And that the grants be restricted to authors and inventors. Not the employers of authors and inventors, not entities which can buy, for the remainder of the protection period, the rights.

Narrowly read, an Author or Inventor would retain exclusive rights and would only be allowed to grant a temporary and nonexclusive grant of that right to others.

Patent and copyright were an interesting experiment at an interesting time (the US Revolution occurred on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, and ended a period of over 1000 years in which technological and economic change had proceeded at an absolutely glacial pace). The experiment appears to be failing in significant ways.

An excellent argument.

Likewise, when the standard copyright term exceeds the median human lifetime, the 'limited time' effectively becomes 'forever.' One of the few things I like about the patent system is that the term is 20 years, which is a reasonable period of exclusivity for a genuinely patentable idea (vs. the abusive attempt to patent the obvious or prior art for litigation purposes).

The Supreme Court has, unfortunately, ruled otherwise.

Lessig, in his retrospective on the Eldred case (term limits extension suit that went to SCOTUS) feels he should have focused on the promotion rather than limited terms clause.

Coulda shoulda woulda. Thanks for trying anyway, Larry.

Copyrights don't exist for the benefit of the owner, they exist to benefit society. Today's laws are a perverse misinterpretation of copyright's original intent.

When I create something from my own creativity, is it not my discovery and invention? If someone I've never heard of who lives 2,000 miles away has created someone similar, then apparently it's not my idea. Who could have guessed?

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." -- John Carmack