Patent Markets?

The latest issue of Science Magazine has a short paper from a Caltech prof suggesting that winner take all patent systems (like ours) do not encourage innovation to the same degree that a market system would. The rough thinking is that scientists are not particularly motivated to work on the really really hard problems because they assume there is probably someone better who will beat them to the prize. If they could get a stake in their partial solution, the market would be flooded with more scientists tackling the big money issues, or so the theory goes. The results really aren't all that surprising, but the researchers did some cool little social science experiments (probably on my friends) to demonstrate. Unfortunately, the devil's probably in the details. It's hard to imagine dealing with the technicalities of moving to a market-based patent system.