Patents are much harder to justify on property grounds, and unjustifiable without at least two changes to the law regarding them. In copyright it is very easy to know whether one thing came from another – for example it is mathematically near-impossible for two strings of more than 10 or 15 words to be independently created. In Lockean or property terms you can demonstrate an appropriation. In patents it is harder to demonstrate that one idea came from another, but it should be required, or at least allowed to be disproven. I think many people would be shocked to learn that independent invention is not a defense to patent infringement. That aspect of patent law is orthogonal to the Lockean idea, and to basic fairness. The second minimum change would be to require working models or detailed documentation of an actual thing, which could be compared to supposed infringers, and serve the disclosure function that patents were designed to encourage. A skilled person in a given field should be able to recreate an invention with nothing but the published patent, otherwise the customary delimiters of property, like recorded public notice and clear boundaries, are too vague to be meaningful.

Those conditions on patents are already largely met by the pharmaceutical industry’s products — and since they deal in discreet compounds theirs are distinguishable in a way more conceptual patents aren’t. You would get into weird enforcement territory if everybody had a universal pill synthesizer at home. At that point it would become hard to square basic privacy, autonomy, etc with an enforcement regime that by definition would have to look into every house in some way to verify compliance, even though nothing else would have changed. Computers have already forced those issues in both the copyright and patent areas.