Upvoted for asking an interesting question, but my answer would be “probably not”. Whether patents are a good idea even as is is debatable — see Michele Boldrin and David Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly — and I expect beefing them up to be bad on the margin.
I’m unclear on whether the proposed super-patents would
be the same as normal patents except fileable before the work of sketching a plausible design has been done, or
would be even more powerful, by also allowing the filer to monopolize a market in which they carry out e.g. “market research, product development and building awareness”, even if that involves no original design work,
but in any case the potential downsides hit me as more obvious than the potential upsides.
Item 1 would likely lead to more patents being filed “just in case”, even without a real intention of bringing a real product to market. This would then discourage other profit-seeking people/organizations from investigating the product area, just as existing patents do.
Item 2 seems to take us beyond the realm of patents and intellectual work; it’s about compensating a seller for expenses which produce positive spillovers for other sellers. As far as I know, that’s not usually considered a serious enough issue to warrant state intervention, like granting a seller a monopoly. I suspect that when The Coca-Cola Company runs an advert across the US, Wal-Mart sells more of its own knockoff colas, but the US government doesn’t subsidize Coca-Cola or its advertising on those grounds!
Upvoted for asking an interesting question, but my answer would be “probably not”. Whether patents are a good idea even as is is debatable — see Michele Boldrin and David Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly — and I expect beefing them up to be bad on the margin.
I’m unclear on whether the proposed super-patents would
be the same as normal patents except fileable before the work of sketching a plausible design has been done, or
would be even more powerful, by also allowing the filer to monopolize a market in which they carry out e.g. “market research, product development and building awareness”, even if that involves no original design work,
but in any case the potential downsides hit me as more obvious than the potential upsides.
Item 1 would likely lead to more patents being filed “just in case”, even without a real intention of bringing a real product to market. This would then discourage other profit-seeking people/organizations from investigating the product area, just as existing patents do.
Item 2 seems to take us beyond the realm of patents and intellectual work; it’s about compensating a seller for expenses which produce positive spillovers for other sellers. As far as I know, that’s not usually considered a serious enough issue to warrant state intervention, like granting a seller a monopoly. I suspect that when The Coca-Cola Company runs an advert across the US, Wal-Mart sells more of its own knockoff colas, but the US government doesn’t subsidize Coca-Cola or its advertising on those grounds!