Once the patent got approved, should they decided to sell the rights to use the tech to ASIC companies, these companies will simply pass the costs to their end-users, us miners and the huge mining organizations. In the end everyone gets to upgrade, and the situation would stay the same as it is now.
In the end if everyone pays money to acquire that 'improvement', the it is pointless as nobody gains the advantage anyways (everyone's hashrate increases by 20%). In other words, this is pointless as it gets.
Err...You mean like everyone upgrading from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs to ASICs to better_ASICs? That sort of pointlessness?