You are saying that we should ignore the plain language of the constitution and instead look into the authors' minds and invent a convoluted hidden meaning that supposedly has something to do with disclosure.
Many of the same people who wrote and ratified the constitution (1787-1789) also then wrote and ratified the Patent Act of 1790, which (just like earlier English law) included disclosure requirements.
I trust them on what they meant by "promote the progress", over your idiosyncratic interpretation from 225 years later. Especially since even today "progress" is understood to be advanced by widespread-knowledge, not just first-knowledge.
You can't grant a monopoly on an invention without describing the invention. You need something for judges to decide if there is infringement. Disclosure is just a side effect of how patents work, it's not the purpose.
The idea is to promote science by granting exclusive rights, as it says in the constitution. Not to promote science by publishing vague legalistic descriptions of inventions. Inventors do not go rummaging through patent documents for ideas.
Re:Greed and the Wright Brothers
by bitJericho on Saturday April 19, 2014 @08:45AM
(#7613299)
Patent descriptions didn't used to be vague. That's a relatively new technique in avoiding the disclosure requirements legally.
Look at the Wright Brother's patent: http://invention.psychology.msstate.edu/i/Wrights/WrightUSPa...
The document makes perfect sense. Just randomly pick a point and start reading and you learn what they had researched and discovered.
Re:Greed and the Wright Brothers
by lotsofmangos on Saturday April 19, 2014 @10:28AM
(#7613495)
Patents were already a legal device long before European pilgrims settled Jamestown. The original reasons behind patents existing, assuming the non-existence of time machines, has nothing whatsoever to do with the constitution of the USA.
I think he's advocating we read the plain language using definitions of the words as understood at the time they were written.
The US Constitution's language is sufficiently open-ended –"promote the progress of science and useful arts" – that it covers not just incentivized conception but also the 'progress' of knowledge-diffusion (disclosure). Also, in that era, before mass-manufactured products or even a proper understanding of elements and molecules, it was far less likely that the delivered product itself embodied enough information to reverse-engineer the processes that made it.
So:
• not a lie;
• the significance of disclosure is brought up because it was familiar to the authors of the US Constitution;
• the Constitution's language is generic enough to include 'disclosure' as one aspect of the 'progress' it describes;
• modern reasoning about the supposed ease of reverse-engineering doesn't apply to the early patent systems.
See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law#Developm...