As long as people keep focusing solely on these "narrow victories" in order to simply maintain the broken status quo, the broader abuse of the patent system to serve as a legal anti-competitive moat in service of large companies who can afford expensive lawyers will continue. It's not radical to believe that.

> long as people keep focusing solely on these "narrow victories" in order to simply maintain the broken status quo

I’m not saying drop the fight. Just to show a modicum of strategy. Turning an IPR fight into a patent debate lets those looking to quash IPR win while doing nothing for the broader debate.

What is smart tactically is doing exactly this when you oppose something: overscope so people disengage or get distracted in a juicier discussion while forgetting to send the relevant message to their elected or regulator.

On the contrary, continuously applying fresh duct tape to a fundamentally broken system allowing it to limp along allows the opponents to point to it and say "see, the system works as is" and the bias in favor of upholding the status quo wins out. By allowing things to fail, you force people to get engaged to do something to fix the problem, at which point actual change becomes possible.

Allowing important systems to fail is not without cost.

At some point, the immediate cost of fail-and-fix is lower than the total short to mid term cost of not fixing it.

The problem arises when systems are intentionally set up to fail (e.g. USPS pensions, gutting education), because those who set them on a doom course usually do so to offer a privatized "alternative" to pocket the profits.

What course of action doesn't come with a cost? Fixing things well is expensive but fixing things poorly is generally more expensive in the long run.

But the point is that what fixing something well means depends on the context. Total software re-writes are rarely a good idea for large production systems, and software isn't special in that regard.

Yeah, but we don't care about preserving the existing large production system, we explicitly want to switch to a different, more appropriate system.

> By allowing things to fail

Nothing in this context is "allowing things to fail." It's simply strengthening rightsholders' hands.

It's a failure for those who want to weaken rightsholders' hands, which presumably includes anyone who wants to see the patent system completely torn down.

The point is if you want people to act, they need to first feel the pain of inaction. If the status quo is tolerable, there is less incentive to put in the great effort necessary for reform.

Are you speaking/working for EFF? If yes, I'll delete my comment.

Patents are abominations and should not exist. I don't see how informing the public about their negatives benefits patent trolls.

On the other hand, it's been argued that without the threat of a radical faction, moderate reformers are completely toothless. I'm not sure there's a generic answer to this dilemma that applies to all situations.

> it's been argued that without the threat of a radical faction, moderate reformers are completely toothless

Once you're at the table. If you're trying to get people in the room, a radical faction drives them away. In this context, consider how many people didn't bother clicking through to respond to the patent office. And consider how many tuned out the discussion because we've seen it before. That's the power of radical over scoping.

> I’m not sure radicalising this debate helps anyone.

Oh but it does. That’s in part how we ended slavery and gave women full human rights and citizenship. If anything radical ideas shift the Overton window into making progress actually happen.

The second point is that the only correct position here is the radical one: as far as I can tell, the truth here is that (i) patents do far more harm than good, and (ii) they cannot be fixed into more good than harm. Therefore, they should be abolished, plain and simple.

Less radical positions may look reasonable, be more politically acceptable… but the only reality they’d be based on would be the flaws of our human minds and the existing power structures of our society. Because of those I indeed only have the faintest hope about patents being abolished in the foreseeable future. At best I’m hoping for some narrowing down: in scope, duration, or a strengthening of due process (mostly prior art).

But I have yet to be convinced that the best course of action isn’t the complete and utter abolition of the entire patent system. Now one could argue that that patents are a useful tool in our exploitation of the South, and losing it might weaken our position and ultimately make us a tad poorer as the South emancipates. That might even be true, see what happened for the COVID vaccines. But I don’t think this argument would win any votes around here.

Abolishing patents is likely to substantially hinder innovation. Maybe if it is accompanied by reasonable changes to other processes. But without patent protection there is a zero reason to spend $2 billion to $3 billion to get a drug through FDA trials when a competitor can make a generic afterwards for roughly $5 million and undercut you dramatically in the market as a result. People complain about patents endlessly without offering a realistic solve for this problem and think that innovation in fields where innovation is expensive won't be hampered at all despite this clearly not being the case.

> But without patent protection there is a zero reason to spend $2 billion to $3 billion to get a drug through FDA trials when a competitor can make a generic afterwards for roughly $5 million and undercut you dramatically in the market as a result.

I see. The solution here is simple: let the private labs go bankrupt, hire their researchers in public facilities. You’ll get your innovation back. As for the costs, well, sure you need to pay those researchers, but you get most of that back in the form of much cheaper medication.

I mean, why keep capitalism in the areas where it is so obviously failing? I want effective roads, schools, energy, water, hospitals, mass transportation… along with health insurance, retirement plans, unemployment insurance… and for all of those, the best way I know of is to make them public.

And while we’re at it I’d like some democratically run media that aren’t owned by a bunch of ludicrously rich people, so I don’t get automatic propaganda about why making the above public doesn’t work. Because it does. I’m living in France, I’ve seen it work.

> People complain about patents endlessly without offering a realistic solve for this problem

I think I just did. But you have to accept that it means reducing the scope of Capitalism, if not outright ending it. If you don’t, well… explain to me how Capitalism will somehow not burn our planet to a crisp and depletes its resources. Because as far as I can tell the "only system that works" will not work for long. It cannot. Because Physics. Thus it will end, one way or another, and it’d be nice if it didn’t take the world along with it.

I agree that, in general, a series of narrow, tactical victories, especially those which lend themselves to being enshrined in legislation, do more to help a movement than trying to overturn an entire system in one stroke. Base hits rather than grand slams. It's not sexy, it's not what revolutionaries scream about, but it's about a million times more effective.

The goal of a narrow victory seems faulty. I wonder if a "narrow accelerationism" might be more effective.

IP disputes tend to be B or C stories in the public eye-- either super-technical where they only really interest people in very narrow verticals, or containing unsavoury and unmediagenic characters that are easy to demonize.

Give the IP lobby everything it wants, and we create a world of "here's an adorable 6-year-old girl who will die a very painful and public death because of patents" and "we had to burn down the pre-school because Mrs Crumble photocopied some worksheets with Donald Duck printed on them". With any luck, the backlash would be so massive that nobody would dare speak the word "patent" or "copyright" in Congress for three or four centuries.