It doesn't particularly matter what the US constitution says on the matter anyway as patents were up and going long before it was written.
The US constitution does not contain the idea behind patents, it contains a view of how people wanted to encapsulate existing ideas into a legal document for a new nation.
> patents were up and going long before it was written.. the US constitution does not contain the idea behind patents.
Yeah, I find it very interesting how the US constitution is often assumed the origin of patents, but the same people wouldn't assume it's the origin of other legal concepts, like a judicial system.
No one assumed that, but it is a good distillation of what our legal system bases its notion of patents on. Common law is often used as the basis for precedent in the US, but usually not in cases when the constitution gives explicit goals and the means to achieve those goals, as it did with patents and copyright.
