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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

I haven't managed to identify the valve manufacturer.

They definitely ought to be named and shamed.

I did find this: https://www.archyde.com/italian-start-up-3d-prints-valves-to...

Edit: Charging 10000 EUR for a 1 EUR part in a breathing device is typical scumbag behavior. Doing that during a pandemic rises to criminal. Suing people who 3D print parts for free is grounds for nationalization.

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> Charging 10000 EUR for a 1 EUR part in a breathing device is typical scumbag behavior. Doing that during a pandemic rises to criminal. Suing people who 3D print parts for free is grounds for nationalization.

No, it's grounds for abolition of intellectual property. Don't blame the player for crappy rules.

I'm with you on the first sentence, not so much on the second. You can totally blame the player. We all have a morale duty to the communities we live in, abstracting our responsibilities away into law doesn't stop that from being true.

Well said. Law is just a framework not the rules of life.

Still that makes them awful rules when almost every other industry couldn't survive doing the same thing.

> Let me ask a question: when was the last time that America’s chair industry hiked the price of chairs 400% and suddenly nobody in the country could afford to sit down? When was the last time that the mug industry decided to charge $300 per cup, and everyone had to drink coffee straight from the pot or face bankruptcy? When was the last time greedy shoe executives forced most Americans to go barefoot? And why do you think that is?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-d...

Remember this is something that we decided to add. Absent the laws, and more importantly the captured regulatory process which enforces it, it wouldn't be happening.

I'm not convinced this is a requirement to having rules at all.

Its both. Scummy behavior is encouraged by the system but we also have special laws for profiting on a time of crisis.

Its grounds for safe harbors that offer liability limitations or immunity due to the circumstances. (The EU probably has laws that do this, just like the US).

I doubt the medical device industry would exist w/o patent protection. It is just too expensive to bring products to market without the limited monopoly that patents provide. And you have to consider the potential for product liability lawsuits after products get to market. That has to be built into the price as well.

I would expect regulatory capture plays a larger factor than patents in the success of the medical device industry.

If it was legal to own slaves and someone owned slaves, I would blame them. And work to free all their slaves.

Is your salary paid with ad money?

I agree with the sentiment, though it's practically still legal to own slaves in some places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

I find it hard to imagine a modern patent that's based on the Venturi effect. Entirely abolishing intellectual property seems extreme. But the need for higher standards of obviousness seems pretty obvious. And arguably also limits on rent seeking behavior, especially during emergencies.

> Don't blame the player for crappy rules

Didn’t Tesla declare their IP free use because Elon Musk preferred their propagation for the benefit of humanity’s survival over profits?

The players with enough money write the rules, in fact they spend billions on it every year. The case of Trump unsuccessfully trying to buy out a company working on the current vaccine also shows that not everyone in charge has to be a sociopath.

Let's assume we can. The problem is that removing intellectual property will reduce the motivation of investors and the money that goes in research.

The only thing that I have found that is close to what it looks like is this company[1]

[1]https://www.intersurgical.com/info/starmedCPAPmasks

That looks very similar and indeed you can purchase those for 7000 rupees ~ 100 USD at https://m.indiamart.com/proddetail/ventu-cpap-mask-kit-m-l-2... which sounds reasonable for a disposable medical device. The original article is completely unsubstantiated. If the story could be verified then the manufacturer could be named.

And if it cost 1 EUR to 3D print, it probably costs 1/100th that to mass produce in an injection mold.

True, but the monetization of intellectual property only peripherally involves physical objects.

Keep in mind that medical supplies are almost never sold in single units. The 10,000 EUR list price is probably for a bulk package of units.

FTA: "the official list price for a single valve is 10,000 euros"

I don't know who "FTA" is. In any case, medical supplies are almost never sold in single units, especially single use supplies. What's the price for 1,000 units in bulk?

The source business insider article gives Massimo Temporelli as the source that a single unit is 10,000 EUR. Temporelli is not someone involved in the medical industry and might be easily confused by the way pricing works, assuming that "1 unit" is a single piece.

I think that FTA == TFA.

Consider your life priorities if your first instinct is to start "naming and shaming".

Consider your life priorities if your first instinct is to protect people who value profits over lives

It's against a company, not a person.

"Naming and shaming" (= causing a PR disaster for them) is one of the few recourses we have left to try and get companies to behave ethically.

Indeed, and it would set a precedent for other companies. They really don’t want that.

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