[btilly]

Patents aim to trade a temporary bad result (monopoly) for a permanent good result (incentives to invent stuff).

Discussing exactly how bad the temporary bad result is informs discussion of when that trade-off is worthwhile. And this is true whether or not your conclusion is that patents are never OK or only sometimes OK.

[Dylan16807]

When discussing whether X should be patented, it is appropriate to discuss the trade-offs specific to X.

It is a poor time to discuss trade-off generic to all patents. Focusing on them shifts the discussion away from the issue at hand, and toward a political stance that people have already heard.

avar's post does the latter.

Just like in a topic about whether to vote for a specific tax levy, it's inappropriate to talk about whether property taxes as a whole should be abolished.

[omginternets]

>Just like in a topic about whether to vote for a specific tax levy, it's inappropriate to talk about whether property taxes as a whole should be abolished.

Making the argument that a given problem is recurrent is very constructive: consideration of the generic problem can provide arguments for prioritizing your problem as it relates to X. This is especially true when present instances of a problem affect future probability of the same problem occurring.

This is notably the case in law where jurisprudence makes laws progressively more difficult to repeal.