The Patent Expired. The Exclusion Didn’t — and It Doubled the Cost of American Living.
(formerly titled The Forgotten Half of the Patent Clause)
A constitutional-law litigation strategy and a citizen’s playbook — in one book.
An invitation to attorneys — and to readers who know one — to review a constitutional argument being prepared for federal court.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 lets Congress grant inventors exclusive rights, but only “for limited Times.” When a patent expires, the right to make, copy, and improve the invention passes to the public. That is the bargain: a temporary monopoly in exchange for a permanent public domain, affirmed by the Supreme Court across more than a century of unbroken precedent.
Beginning around 1970, federal energy and safety agencies — the EPA, NHTSA, and the Department of Energy — built a regulatory wall around that bargain. They did not repeal the public’s right to remanufacture a patent-expired tractor, pickup, furnace, or semi-truck; they wrote rules — a documented regulatory ratchet and a statutory anti-backsliding mechanism, neither granting a grandfather exemption for remanufactured patent-expired products — that make it impossible to lawfully build and sell one. The core technology is legally free. No one can lawfully build it. The book’s claim is that the words “limited Times” have, in practical effect, been removed from the Constitution by federal regulation, without an amendment and without a vote — and that the remedy lies in a single federal courtroom, on two constitutional prongs: the Patent Clause and the Takings Clause.
No federal court has ever ruled on the question. It is a question of first impression. The book is the public-facing brief for the litigant who eventually files it.
Two documents give the fastest route in: Chapter One, “Four Problems, One Remedy,” which lays out the problem in plain language, and the Book Brief, which shows what the book contains and how the argument is built.
I am not an attorney, and the fair question any careful lawyer will ask is whether a non-lawyer can be trusted to handle a constitutional argument responsibly. The record I can offer:
Two doubts stand between this manuscript and a publisher. First: can a non-lawyer be trusted to handle a constitutional argument responsibly? Second: artificial intelligence was used to develop it.
The first is best answered together with the second. The book’s Preface sets out cases where an outsider originated an approach, directing heavy use of AI, and the field then did what only the field can do with it. Luke Farritor, a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate with no papyrology and no Greek, trained a model on faint ink traces and read a word from inside a sealed Herculaneum scroll; papyrologists confirmed the reading. Christopher Shallue, a Google engineer and no astronomer, put a neural network on the weak Kepler signals and surfaced an eighth planet at Kepler-90; an astronomer co-authored the paper. Neither case shows expertise was unnecessary. Both show where an outsider’s contribution can legitimately begin. That is the only claim I make about my own standing.
A third case is not about outsiders at all. In 2011 Stanford researchers built a system called C-Path and turned it on breast-cancer tissue slides, measuring 6,642 features of every image. Grading had been done by reading the cancer cells themselves, under a scheme largely unchanged since the 1920s. C-Path found that the stroma — the ordinary connective tissue around the tumor — predicted survival more strongly than the tumor did. Trained on one hospital’s cohort, tested on a second, published in peer review, and standing for fifteen years since. Nothing hid the stroma. It was on every slide, in plain sight, and the specialists did not count it, because they were sure they already knew which part of the slide mattered. This is what happened all through American history until I got AI to recognize what had happened to the second half of the Patent Clause. See the chapter Why Nobody Noticed: How a Constitutional Violation Hides in Plain Sight.
The hallucination worry deserves its own answer. Forty-two document files lie beneath my draft, carrying 1,088 saved versions as of 9 September. Every one is a man deciding what to keep, what to cut, and what to rewrite. Every authority in the book was opened and read. The tools were not ghost-writers; they were a small newsroom. One drafted prose and edited structure. OpenCase checked citations against the authoritative federal record and twice flagged circuit-court conflicts my own synthesis had missed. Others retrieved sources, read material the rest could not reach, and audited the drafts against one another, chapter by chapter. The patent above is an AI system, so I came to these tools knowing both where they fail and how to check what they produce. The remedy for hallucination is not to put the tool down. It is to verify the assertion, read the citation, and edit hard.
This book does not claim to have been independently verified. It claims to be checkable, which is a different property and a more useful one. Every case, statute, and regulation it relies on is cited so that a reader can open it and see for himself. The book hands the reader the primary sources and invites him to reason the argument independently, and reports what happens when independent reasoners do. A former federal energy regulatory attorney has read successive drafts across a long correspondence, disagreed with parts of them, and the first chapter was rewritten in consequence, in response to his input and to that of a practicing litigator. Attorneys are now engaging with the argument publicly, under their own names and with their reputations attached. That is not a certification that the argument is right. It is evidence that people with something to lose consider it worth arguing with.
One chapter is built precisely for a skeptical reader. “Reason the Constitutional Argument Yourself: The Open-Book Examination” hands you the primary materials — the Supreme Court holdings, the regulatory facts, the statutory and regulatory authority, and both advocates’ cases — and invites you to put the question to an artificial-intelligence language model and judge the reasoning for yourself. Eleven independent AI models, reasoning from those materials, converged on a finding that a cognizable injury exists. They decide nothing — only a court can — but the convergence is offered as one more thing a reader can weigh, and verify, without taking my word for any of it.
The chapter, the examination materials, the prompts, the scoring sheet, and the full record of the eleven models’ replies are all available here:
If you are an attorney
As I move toward publishers, the recurring question is whether a non-lawyer can be trusted to handle the constitutional argument responsibly. A few words from additional lawyers would settle that better than anything I could say myself. If, after your review, you are comfortable doing so, would you be willing to write a brief paragraph — two or three sentences — stating simply that the work is well-researched and merits serious consideration and a public hearing?
I am asking only for that — a statement of seriousness, not agreement with my conclusions. If you find it warrants more, you are of course free to say so, but there is no expectation. Entirely your own words, reflecting only what you can honestly stand behind.
The chapters “Four Problems, One Remedy” and “Reason the Constitutional Argument Yourself,” together with the exam materials above, are the quickest way to understand the argument and then take a deep dive — they let you test its core quickly. The full manuscript is there for whoever wishes to go deeper. Any attorney who contacts me can receive the complete Author’s Review manuscript for their review — as a PDF, as a printed trade paperback (available at cost, including shipping), or as an EPUB — whichever suits how you prefer to read.
If you know an attorney
If this argument belongs in front of someone you know who practices law, I would be grateful if you would pass it along.
x.com/RoleighMartin · RoleighMartin@proton.me
Earlier articles covering the argument (prior to doing the book manuscript):