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Comment by MikeUt | Hacker News Reader

> The appeals court agreed, ruling that the judges performed important work without supervision and so were “principal officers” under the Constitution, meaning that they had to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

What bothers me is that granting a patent is easy, but invalidating one requires a "principal officer" and is treated as a huge infringement on property rights. What about the rights of everyone else, who are forbidden from using a technology by the patent-holder? Isn't that a much greater infringement upon liberty or property, than invalidating a patent?

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Grants of patents are done under the auspices and oversight of a principal officer as well, and most invalidations are done by inferior officers. (In fact, appeals in the patent application process are handled by the same Patent Trial and Appeal Board that handles patent challenges at issue in this case.) This case doesn't concern who usually makes the decision; the case concerns who has the final, authoritative say in the decision -- the inferior officers have to actually be under the direction of a principal officer.

Replace "patent" with "parcel of land". Now how does it sound?

What bothers me is that selling a parcel of land is easy, but invalidating the sale requires a "principal officer" and is treated as a huge infringement on property rights. What about the rights of everyone else, who are forbidden from using a parcel of land by the land owner? Isn't that a much greater infringement upon liberty or property, than invalidating the sale of a parcel of land?

Maybe "generating space trash" would be a more apt analogy, since you're going from nothing to something as you generate it (unlike parcel of land which there's a fixed amount of), and the more of it that's generated, the worse off the public is (space trash leads to more danger while orbiting, more patents leads to more legal danger while doing business).

Parcel of public land. An overworked bureaucrat probably shouldn't be selling those off cheaply, should they? Some private land is even subject to the right to roam*, so the public can still access it.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

> Parcel of public land

America bootstrapped its private property market. (No. Bad elephant.) All of her land was "first" public land (or royal land) and then granted to private persons.

That distinction is only relevant if talking about selling a patent from one patent holder to another. Instead we're talking about creating a patent.

There's a big difference between a parcel of private land changing hands, and a parcel of public land becoming private.

All of it was home to people already here, who didn't claim ownership the way we think of private, or even public, property. Perhaps "stolen land" would be apt.

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