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.
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.
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.
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?