The Intellectual Monopoly Clause of the US Constitution

The Congress shall have power ...

 

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries

The intellectual monopoly clause "grants" Congress the power to create copyrights and patents.

This clause (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) is also known as the Progress Clause, the Intellectual Property Clause, the Copyright and Patent Clause, or, simply, the Copyright Clause.

See Wikipedia's entry on the Copyright Clause.

I put the word grants in quotes above, because we don't have the power to grant monopolies. The sovereignty of the people is limited, as Benjamin Constant writes in On the Sovereignty of the People (1815).  This clause violates our rights. 

Thomas Jefferson's initial instincts were right in his 1788 letter to James Madison, when he urges the suppression of all forms of monopoly grants.

The saying there shall be no monopolies, lessens the incitements to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of fourteen years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful, to be opposed to that of their general suppression.