Historically Speaking | Constitution 101: Intellectual Property Clause

As a professor, one of the most important things I own is my ideas. I spend way too much time just thinking about things, sometimes very unimportant things, sometimes in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping things, but often about history things that eventually make their way into this column. When we think about the original Constitution, we tend to think about how it was designed to limit government power, but not necessarily to protect individual rights. That is why we needed the Bill of Rights after the Constitution already had been ratified. Yet, in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, while listing the powers of Congress, we see one of its responsibilities is to protect ideas. That is how important ideas were to our Founding Fathers. It is one of the few places in the original Constitution where individual rights receive direct protection.

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