Whether Market experimentation can be protected as Intellectual Property

Whether Market experimentation can be protected as Intellectual Property? Why don’t intellectual property theory and property rights theory more generally support the idea of Intellectual property protection for market experimentation? In certain cases exclusive rights have been used to encourage market experimentation. Exclusive franchise agreements are a widely employed means by which franchisors encourage new franchisees to risk developing a business in new geographic locations.Likewise British “patents of importation,” which provided exclusive rights for the importer of a technology already existing outside of Britain, were permissible for several years. USA took the leading role to promote market experimentation by rejecting the patents of importation. The current systems of intellectual property have several doctrines that are difficult to explain unless the relevant intellectual property rights are recognized as partially supporting the goal of encouraging market experimentation. Few observers said that there are companies in USA which do not produce any actual products but merely obtain and enforce patents. The traditional theory of the patent system believes in the basic idea that for obtaining exclusive patent rights is against the disclosure of the technology set forth in the patent document itself. Some patentee who makes a sufficient disclosure and obtains a valid patent cannot be playing with the system. So when the patent system will have two goals one spurring the disclosure of technological information and the other fostering actual investment in real-world market experiments—then the concern over patent trolls proves logical. It means that the law can be more liberal to organizations that have both made technological disclosure in patent specifications and taken risk in making investments in new technology based businesses.