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Comment by Frost1x | Hacker News Reader

Or that the situation was absolutely ridiculous to begin with and goes way beyond what was ever intended by patent laws.

I find it hard to believe that $11k was a justifiable price or that the valve design was novel or sophisticated enough that someone reproduced the geometry from scratch so trivially (without even using sophisticated 3D scanning techniques I might add, as I understand it).

A lot of businesses strategically buy and sell patents in processes to prevent others from implementing the full process and to force royalties on single pieces. Patents have really got out of hand and in my opinion, stifle innovation more than secure and foster it the way they're currently being abused.

IP protections do need to exist but there's a lot in terms of protection that is just garbage.

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> sophisticated 3D scanning techniques

It’s not too hard to convert a DICOM file, and most hospitals have a CT scanner than is up to the task if you give cake to the right person. Engineering departments know this well.

For a tiny valve that size, you'd almost certainly need to use a MicroCT scanner though. I dont know how many hospitals keep one on hand since they're very niche and there are obvious issues imaging anything living (movement, radiation exposure, etc).

Its typically used outside of hospital environments for scanning. The large scanners won't give you the level of detail you'd need, at least not the ones I worked with.

That price almost certainly had liability baked into it.

I wouldn’t be certain about that. Getting medical equipment vendors to agree to pay for breakages or resulting costs is hard, and their markups buy a lot of lawyering.

So the price has lawyering baked in. I agree with GP that this is almost the same as liability.

Why would each part need it's own liability/layering baked in?

The prices would be insane, if that was the case.

You must be new to American healthcare.

€10k for a part that can be 3D printed for €1 isn't insane?

I think the price has research, development, and the cost of clinical trials baked in. I believe these costs can be very expensive, as (at least in the US) there are lots of hoops to jump through in order to sell medical devices. And many experiments don't lead to successful products, so the costs need to make in the "failure rate" as well.

I think a lot of the high prices charged for medical gear isn't so much to recoup the variable cost of production of that item, it's to recoup the initial/fixed cost of bringing the gizmo to market. If people can "photocopy" someone else's device by just covering the variable cost, it might cripple companies' incentives for developing for the medical market.

And I believe it's true that if a patent holder doesn't go after every known infringement, it becomes much more difficult to go after any known infringement.

Not saying that 3d printing these valves doesn't feel like the right thing to do in this case. Just saying that feels like a more nuanced situation, rather than being cut/dry.

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