COVID-19 is bringing to the surface more and more fascinating cases where under "normal" circumstances Capitalism and making a profit is a good thing, but under just a little bit of pressure, suddenly it's evil.
Canada have just made it illegal ($5000 fine) for trying to profit off sales of toilet paper or sanitizer, and listings for them have been banned from eBay and Kijiji (Canada's version of Craigslist). Of course, under normal circumstances it's perfectly fine for Nike to make a pair of shoes for $3 (paying people terrible wages) and then sell them for $300 dollars. Their share price goes up and the Capitalists are happy.
Under normal circumstances patents are a good way to protect IP, and nobody cared last month that a part was $11,000 dollars and they had a monopoly on making it.
As one twitter post said "COVID-19 is a blacklight and it's revealing a lot of nasty stains on our Capitalist society"
The problem is that there's lots of regulatory capture in the medical industry and that lots of people don't mind it so long as they get to elect people that say the things they want to hear. Plenty of people care, just not a voting majority.
I never understand these capitalism criticisms. It’s like criticizing modern medicine because Coronavirus exists. Yeah, it’s not a perfect system but I’m not going to switch to homeopathy just yet.
Your analogy makes no sense. Modern medicine didn't create, or even encourage the creation of, the coronavirus. Price gouging is very much an obvious consequence of unbridled capitalism.
That is fucking rich. You obviously never tried buying something in the USSR. Or when rationing was in effect during WW2. Or medicinal alcohol during prohibition. All government regulated supply resulting in a very expensive secondary market. Black markets thrive under systems other than capitalism where price gouging is the exception rather than the rule.
Yes you are right. Even with laws preventing price gouging people will sell/buy what they want. If sellers/buyers cannot do that in government regulated market - they will do that in the black markets
Price gouging is evidence of a failed market and not a consequence of capitalism. In the event of market failure, government intervention is often warranted until the market can correct itself.
However, laws against price gouging are not the whole solution.
Laws against price gouging do not prevent hoarding or panic buying. Thus, holding the price of the goods artificially low in the face of increased demand leads to shortages. (Unsurprisingly)
If you have laws against price gouging you need to have laws that limit the number of units purchased to reduce hoarding. Otherwise, you inevitably will have short term shortages.
Well, in fairness there are real problems, but they're not unsolvable ones nor reasons to abandon capitalism, we just need to fix the IP laws in various ways and make other tweaks.
The real problem is that some people want to make shortages like this permanent by going full communism.
IP laws are wrong in all circumstances. I don’t owe anyone money for singing a song, nor when I print a shape, nor when I photograph a painting, nor when I give a friend a book.
That depends on where you live. In many places, the law doesn't punish victims for self-defense. You certainly can kill a person who is attacking you. In a few places, notably Texas, it is legal to kill a person to stop a theft or to recover stolen property, as long as there is no non-lethal way to do so.
Yes i stand corrected. I had my country LT in mind. But as you self write “ as long as there is no non-lethal way to do so.” Same probabbly for rape. If guy trying to commit rape changes his mind just by seeing a gun, and stops, it would be illegal for you just to open fire and kill him.
Legal standards vary. In most of the USA, he probably could be shot.
In nearly all of the USA, he could be shot if he were in the victim's home. Most states do not have a duty to flee when in the home, and the attacker's continued presence is considered a threat. Only in Vermont and Washington, D.C. is there a duty to attempt to flee when in the home.
Outside the home, in most states he probably could be shot, at least if he weren't clearly departing. He can't just stay there being a threat. There is no duty for the victim to attempt to flee, even if outside the home.
An interesting case involves a purse snatcher in a Texas parking lot. A bystander pulled out a huge revolver with a laser sight, fired, and killed the purse snatcher to recover the purse. It was legal.
You'd think an easy enough change to the laws around IP for medical equipment would be that if they can't supply critical parts, particularly under extreme circumstances, they most hold harmless any supplier that is able to supply said parts.
I think there should be and probably are laws that give the. Executive the ability to shut off these rules in a time of crisis. Not sure it should be or needs to be automatic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This crisis will force us to rethink patent laws and healthcare regulations. under the current circumstances, patent laws and other laws designed to give the medical industry Monopoly over their creations are preventing life saving actions. We will eventually reach a point where a vaccine / cure is found, and instead of allowing all possible companies to manufacture it, patent laws will delay things and actively cause thousands of deaths from those delays.
They do it with software licensing for sure. There are almost certainly satellites and weapons systems out there with GPL code in them but good luck proving it.
Actually, I think designs and patents are free for personal use.
So any easy way around it is to document how to get to that design, and let’s patients print valves for personal use
Last I checked, patents only prevent you from selling infringing items, not making them for your own use. From the pictures I saw, the 3D item wasn’t a straight copy, so the copyright case would also be weak.
I doubt Fracassi is open to any legal liability at all. The hospital might be guilty of some IP infringement, especially if they charged someone for use of the part, or for the part itself.
I’d guess the bigger liability would come from the patients suing for the use of non-approved medical devices (which I doubt will happen, or would hold up in this case).
Note: not a lawyer, and certainly not an italian lawyer.
IANAL I guess I have to admit I'm not a lawyer but I think well-read laymen are allowed to share what they have learned: Patents provide a monopoly on the practice of an invention, which can be translated into an economic benefit. If I make 10,000 of these valves that is EUR 10,000,000 that the putative patent holder couldn't have. Morally, this is no time for medically necessary parts to be scarce and expensive. Technically, I would want to know how the law applies to the situation.
> Last I checked, patents only prevent you from selling infringing items, not making them for your own use.
INAL, but I'm pretty sure that's not true. If that were the case MP3 patents would not have been such a big problem for OSS software. Similar things apply(/applied) to open source hardware designs for 3D printing technology.
I tried to find out many times how far patents prevent non-profit usage, but also never arrived at a clear conclusion.
Looking at it now, my comment is slightly ambiguous. I mean that I would also love for the designs to get leaked, and I thought Johnny555's comment was great
In the US the Federal government or its agents can infringe patents basically at will. The remedy to the patent holder in a case like this would be the cost of the valves.
No special court orders are required. Neither can the infringed sue to stop the US gov (or its contractors) from infringing. If a US state infringes it may be protected by sovereign immunity (assuming it has not waived that protection)
Of course Italian law may be different, but they or the EU probably have similar immunities.
Sorry I should have been specific. The "available remedies" section doesn't really support your assertion about the recovery. But yeah it's basically always lower than civil torts and you're otherwise totally right.
By witholding the supply of valves the management of are conspiring to murder. Issue arrest warrants for the entire management. When lives are at stake, playing hardball with insatiable capitalists might do the trick.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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 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 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.
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.
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.
The Italian government should grant an amnesty for this immediately. Lives are on the line. There is no question about what the right thing to do in this situation is.
IANAL but I‘m not sure it would work this way since parliament cannot directly influence the judge. And I think this wouldn’t be a criminal case, so they would have to change patent laws (might take too long now), or find a different way - eg they could promise to fully reimburse all infringers of this patent though.
That's actually the wrong way round. In order to be pardoned, they first have to be found guilty, so they need to go through the expense of defending themselves. What's needed is to prevent the cases from getting that far in the first place, which could be done by the government taking possession of any relevant patents for the duration and issuing a time-limited license.
You could say that about many patents, probably most medicine ones. Also no one would want to do business with Italy, and it probably breaks EU & international laws.
I doubt a valve is novel enough to be patented, and the 3D design was reverse engineered so it is not covered by Copyright. I doubt these guys have any kind of case that would stand up in court
You can't know that w/o seeing the valve and the patent.
But there are probably immunities or limitations of liability at play here based on the circumstances.
Generally, the medical device industry is cut throat and patent heavy. They patent every tweak they can to fend off competitors. It makes some sense because of the expense associated with bringing a medical device to market.
I don't think it counts as reverse engineered if you had access to the original - ie if you take measurements to reproduce it, you are copying it, not reverse engineering.
Measuring the physical attributes of something certainly counts as "reverse engineering".
You might be thinking of clean room design [1], where one team does the reverse engineering and writes spec, and another team implements it from the spec.
So I don't know Italian or European parent law. But how would this be illegal? It appears the part was redesigned from scratch, so I don't it used any process that is patented.
Of course maybe patent law is different over there. I also realize it is possible this company is simply try to intimidate. Just wondering if they actually have legal staggering.
Charging this kind of money for a valve should come with an agreement to produce enough of said valve, or providing the 3D file for emergencies like that. It’s actually in manufacturers‘ best interest - imagine we get this kind of scenario more often. I think it’s quite possible that a grey market for 3D printed medical parts will develop as a result, bringing down prices a lot. And it will be tolerated by governments because they saw this happen.
At least in criminal law there is the concept of "necessity". That is, an illegal activity may in certain cases be legal, if it is necessary to prevent serious harm.
Since the manufacturer was unable to supply the part, I would argue that 3D printing it was most certainly a "necessity", at least until either patients stop requiring it, or more parts can be procured.
There are some civil law analogs such as being able to trespass someone else's property in emergency situations.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadCanada have just made it illegal ($5000 fine) for trying to profit off sales of toilet paper or sanitizer, and listings for them have been banned from eBay and Kijiji (Canada's version of Craigslist). Of course, under normal circumstances it's perfectly fine for Nike to make a pair of shoes for $3 (paying people terrible wages) and then sell them for $300 dollars. Their share price goes up and the Capitalists are happy.
Under normal circumstances patents are a good way to protect IP, and nobody cared last month that a part was $11,000 dollars and they had a monopoly on making it.
As one twitter post said "COVID-19 is a blacklight and it's revealing a lot of nasty stains on our Capitalist society"
The problem is that there's lots of regulatory capture in the medical industry and that lots of people don't mind it so long as they get to elect people that say the things they want to hear. Plenty of people care, just not a voting majority.
However, laws against price gouging are not the whole solution.
Laws against price gouging do not prevent hoarding or panic buying. Thus, holding the price of the goods artificially low in the face of increased demand leads to shortages. (Unsurprisingly)
If you have laws against price gouging you need to have laws that limit the number of units purchased to reduce hoarding. Otherwise, you inevitably will have short term shortages.
The real problem is that some people want to make shortages like this permanent by going full communism.
The manufacturer may threaten, huff and puff, but juries are filled with human, who will feel same same wrongness we do.
In theory, everybody cares about FDA certification and all the legal details like HIPPA and stuff.
In practice, when SHTF ie in a situation like 9/11, most humans beings seem to do the best they can with what they have.
No one should refuse to act just by fear of being sued for doing something, when inaction will guarantee the death of other human beings.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590069
In nearly all of the USA, he could be shot if he were in the victim's home. Most states do not have a duty to flee when in the home, and the attacker's continued presence is considered a threat. Only in Vermont and Washington, D.C. is there a duty to attempt to flee when in the home.
Outside the home, in most states he probably could be shot, at least if he weren't clearly departing. He can't just stay there being a threat. There is no duty for the victim to attempt to flee, even if outside the home.
An interesting case involves a purse snatcher in a Texas parking lot. A bystander pulled out a huge revolver with a laser sight, fired, and killed the purse snatcher to recover the purse. It was legal.
I guess they are not in consumer space and donate valves would not have any real return.
[1] https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocke...
[2] E-book download: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19000
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.
The prices would be insane, if that was the case.
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.
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.
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.
Finally, forced licensing is another option.
Now suppose someone publishes, anonymously, the design file online...
This isn't actually complicated. We're talking about saving lives in a pandemic. Who gives a shit about IP law?
I doubt Fracassi is open to any legal liability at all. The hospital might be guilty of some IP infringement, especially if they charged someone for use of the part, or for the part itself.
I’d guess the bigger liability would come from the patients suing for the use of non-approved medical devices (which I doubt will happen, or would hold up in this case).
Note: not a lawyer, and certainly not an italian lawyer.
INAL, but I'm pretty sure that's not true. If that were the case MP3 patents would not have been such a big problem for OSS software. Similar things apply(/applied) to open source hardware designs for 3D printing technology.
I tried to find out many times how far patents prevent non-profit usage, but also never arrived at a clear conclusion.
No special court orders are required. Neither can the infringed sue to stop the US gov (or its contractors) from infringing. If a US state infringes it may be protected by sovereign immunity (assuming it has not waived that protection)
Of course Italian law may be different, but they or the EU probably have similar immunities.
https://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/2927
Edit to add:
I am an IP attorney so I appreciate that to some people this article may seem like it contradicts some of what I said. IP law is hard.
But as far as I could tell, with one quick read, it basically confirms what I said.
Also, thanks for the link, I hadn't seen this article before.
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.
[1]https://www.intersurgical.com/info/starmedCPAPmasks
No, it's grounds for abolition of intellectual property. Don't blame the player for crappy rules.
> 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century
Didn’t Tesla declare their IP free use because Elon Musk preferred their propagation for the benefit of humanity’s survival over profits?
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.
"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.
There aren't many clear, easy choices in a situation like this.
Here's one.
You could say that about many patents, probably most medicine ones. Also no one would want to do business with Italy, and it probably breaks EU & international laws.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22588619
Are the manufacturers forced by any legal precedent to sue in order to defend their patents?
But there are probably immunities or limitations of liability at play here based on the circumstances.
Generally, the medical device industry is cut throat and patent heavy. They patent every tweak they can to fend off competitors. It makes some sense because of the expense associated with bringing a medical device to market.
You might be thinking of clean room design [1], where one team does the reverse engineering and writes spec, and another team implements it from the spec.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
If other hospitals do indeed need this valve, we should be spending our time doing this.
edit: also, you really need a working machine to ensure that the design that you have created works is properly functional
Since the manufacturer was unable to supply the part, I would argue that 3D printing it was most certainly a "necessity", at least until either patients stop requiring it, or more parts can be procured.
There are some civil law analogs such as being able to trespass someone else's property in emergency situations.