I suspect you're perfectly well aware of both the Constitutional justification for copyrights and patents, and the extent of the abuse to which that innocuous little line has been subjected, but choose to pretend otherwise because you're hoping to join the trolls' ranks yourself one of these days.
Patents? Now you are confusing patents and copyright because you keep talking about "intellectual property." This is about copyrights. Patents have nothing in common with copyrights.
Copyrights protect specific creations, not entire classes of ideas like patents do. If someone creates something and copyrights it, then I fully support their freedom to do as they wish with their creation, be that to destroy it, use it, sell it to someone else, or assign rights to another party to protect their creation. No one else's rights are infringed. Another person can still create what they want as long as it's not an duplicate of a copyrighted work. If I were to deny someone else those rights to their creation I deny myself those rights, which I do not wish to do.
The people that are being sued are copying the entirety of a copyrighted work without permission. That's not fair use. And it's a news article, for Pete's sake. Has our educational system faltered so much that people cannot write, in their own words, a summary of a news article rather than illegally reproduce it in its entirety? It seems even more absurd given that most of the infringers could have likely linked to the original articles, like Slashdot does, rather than reproduce them. I fully support going after people for such flagrant violations. I would certainly want someone to respect my copyrights. That's why I don't infringe copyrights. It's not okay with me to freely download movies, music, and software without paying for them if I haven't been given permission to do so by the copyright holder. I hold the same feelings toward written works such as photographs, books, and newspaper articles.
There's nothing trollish about that. In fact, I find it to be very important because copyright enforcement is one of the tools that are used to protect open source and free software. The Free Software Foundation performs a function not unlike that described in the article. People assign copyrights for their programs and contributions to the Free Software Foundation who then actively enforces those copyrights when the licensing is violated. The Software Freedom Law Center performs a similar function.
But, of course, you have already stated that you find such actions to be only performed by trolls. Well, go back to your sociopathic behavior of taking everything you can without permission and thinking you are giving the finger to the trolls or "the man." Your actions and lack of respect for others will ultimately make the world a worse place for the rest of us who create things, whether we sell them or give them away freely under specific licenses (CC, GPL, etc.).
