It's all so broken, it makes me want something dramatic to happen. Maybe the robots will take over soon and be better at governing. Or perhaps yogurt. Or maybe we can start over on Mars.
I'm not really interested in "external magic". The core structure is wrong. We should create a new paradigm that works for the citizens by default.
Then, it will have to compete with the existing ways. If it's worthy of being the new normal, it should be able to compete and win.
I think that means that economic activity on the platform with the sane IP policy would need to be more desirable for both buyers and sellers. It's obvious why sellers would want to avoid using platforms that are either so riddled with bogus IP that they can't operate (like USD), or so bereft of enforcement that they get no credit for originality (like CNY). But an incentive structure that keeps buyers from jumping ship to the latter sort... That's going to take some creativity.
My best shot at it would be this: Supposing the underlying system is a proof of stake system, perhaps your staking rewards could be reduced or increased based on the extent to which your purchasing habits transferred value to platforms that don't support the desired IP features.
So even though you may pay more for the IP compliant product up front, in the long run the system rewards you for not funding its IP-deviant competitor.
The savvy thing for a buyer to do in such a situation would be to have separate identities on each platform, so you spend your no-rules tokens on no-rules products and you spend your regulated tokens on regulated products, thereby avoiding penalties for being a traitor. Hopefully, the market cap of either economy's token would then hinge on which one functioned better independently of the other: May the economy with the best set of policies win (where winning means attracting the participants from its competition).
The trouble is, we don't have infinite resources to just spawn economic petri dishes like this. Eventually the competing economies will come into conflict over more that just which is more fun to participate in. Eventually they'll start wasting resources on fighting over access to some mineral or whatever. I'm still noodling on fixes for that, but even so, I think that such a system would be no worse than the one we have.
I think you're really close, but have specified the inverse of the fundamental problem. The system is generally dominated by seller interests. There is no consumer advocacy on the level of corporate advocacy.
Teaching, yeah right.
"Teaching" is what the patents are supposed to do. In reality, there is nearly always nothing to actually learn other than how much of, say, the act of 'breathing' the claimant is trying to do a land-grab on.
To explain this trend I might vaguely gesture toward businesses responding to stresses as the postwar golden economic era ended, except 1) old patents from before the postwar boom (e.g. 1930s) were also useful and to-the-point and 2) academic publications also grew more bullshitty in the same approximate time frame.
See also: "The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."
- John Carmack
One can make a principled argument to abolish all patents. (If you don't believe in intellectual property rights for inventions).
However, arguments to abolish so-called software patents don't make much sense. Software is just an implementation detail of an invention. It is not the invention.