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Comment by sandov | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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 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.

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