Consider how patents and copyrights interact with respect to software. Say you make a new audio encoder leveraging some psycho-acoustic property. Copyright protects the literal source code only. It doesn't prevent someone from doing a "clean room" reimplementation of your software, and in the process taking advantage of all of the expensive testing you did to validate your psycho-acoustic model.
Patents as they exist today might apply to any encoder leveraging that psycho-acoustic property. I.e. a competitor couldn't hold up the fact that it performed independent testing to build its own psycho-acoustic model as a defense to patent infringement.
My proposal falls in-between. You can prevent someone from reverse-engineering your program to copy the essential details, which is the fruit of your expensive R&D. However, you can't prevent someone from using the same basic idea when they go to the expense of deriving those essential details for themselves from the basic idea. What patents as they exist now protect, and what my proposal explicitly wouldn't, is the "flash of insight." The realization that multiple people may have in response to some journal paper that some newly-described psycho-acoustic phenomenon may be used to build better audio encoders.