But for all the benefits of culling faulty intellectual-property rights, the board is under existential threat. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge that the patent office’s new procedure is unconstitutional because invalidating a patent amounts to an unlawful takeover of private property.

The accusers in the case, Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group, argue that taking private property is something only a court — not a government agency like the patent office — can do.

It’s hard to tell how the Supreme Court will rule. Patents are not standard-issue private property, like a plot of land. They are granted by the government to encourage innovation, a public good, because inventors might not invent without a period of exclusivity over the fruits of their idea.

Beyond the constitutional questions, I would suggest to the justices on the court that they consider the ramifications of their decision on the United States economy.

Charging royalties for ideas that are obvious or were concocted so long ago that they are already in the public domain — like making a call by touching numbers on your smartphone screen, or fastening your trousers with a zipper — exact a cost but provide no benefit. Striking down a bad patent is less about confiscating property than about discovering that the property right should not have been awarded in the first place.

Stringent intellectual-property laws seem to be doing little to encourage real innovation and entrepreneurship. Indeed, an increasingly robust body of research finds that the gradual strengthening of patents has hindered innovation rather than foster it.

The patents Teva was trying to uphold, which the patent office tribunal shot down, were designed not to establish its exclusive rights over a new technology but to prolong its exclusive rights to an old one. Its case is not unusual: Researchers are finding that more and more pharmaceutical companies are recycling and repurposing old medicines rather than inventing new ones.