They may have great intentions. Who knows, but boy-howdy if it walks like a troll...
I don't really care if you hate the patent system, or hate that somebody wants to treat 3D printing as a traditional business instead of altruistically open sourcing all the things. To publicly lambaste a competitor through disinformation just because they don't share your personal values is about as classless as it gets. This is open-and-shut witch-hunt territory.
http://hackaday.com/2012/04/23/automated-bed-leveling-with-o...
Second, I disagree with your priorities and/or point of view on this, and I think it might be anti-hacker. It must be at once obvious to everyone that desktop 3D printing is both vital to the future and currently a "cottage" industry. What matters more: the future, or our personal notions of what's classy?
I feel that any action intended as a land-grab for enormous swathes of intellectual territory in an industry so driven by, and amenable to, individual invention and modification, rightly deserves the opprobrium of all hacker types.
Trying to patent compensating for a non-level bed in 3D printers is a jerk move. You could provide a similar defensive moat by just publishing your work, without stifling any of your peers in this infant industry.
Edit: when I said "priorities", I was talking about specifically about prioritizing being classy over protecting a nascent industry, and how that could be anti-garage-innovator. Re-reading my comment, though, I guess it sounds a bit more personal, which wasn't my intent!
The reality is that the patent system exists, in all it's horrible innovation-stifling glory. It's business, nothing more. It's not right and it's ruining the world, but you have to work within the system until the system changes.
If there is other prior art, that's fine. So be it. But the author did not provide any of that art, and instead made false claims based on a knee-jerk reaction to something that he misread.
I don't like having to defend the patent system at all, but the author is in the wrong. Simple as that.
His point was about neither of those; it was about what is legal - something you seem completely uninterested in. Yeah, it might not be "classy" to file patents, but claiming they've done something that would invalidate the patent when they haven't surely isn't classy, either.
I'm glad that you did find it - that is indeed very important information to take into account.
One note though - your tone and suggestion of "an open-and-shut witch-hunt" is very aggressive and makes me instantly think that you have ulterior motives. No idea if you do, but I feel like you were jumping to conclusions about the intent of the author. Can you imagine a scenario where the author didn't know about the provisional application? That's not an excuse, but changes the scenario from disinformation to misinformation and witch-hunt to mistake.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20140117575.pdf
As for my tone, it may sound aggressive, but I also feel that the aggressiveness is justified. This person is (successfully) attempting to leverage an already patent-weary community to force Stratasys into unnecessary legal drama based on nothing. It doesn't really matter if it's misinformation or intentional disinformation, because it is completely inexcusable to make such claims as absolute truth without doing any reasonable amount of research.
Witch-hunt (noun): An intensive effort to discover and expose disloyalty, subversion, dishonesty, or the like, usually based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence.
This situation is the definition of a witch-hunt. A mistake would be to just raise the question of patent illegitimacy based on misinformation. It becomes a witch-hunt when he encourages people to submit prior art to invalidate the patent, thereby wasting everyone's time and money.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0121813.html <- I've been filling with urethane glue for a while now, as a side note,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20140120196.pdf <- http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12320
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0117585.html <- everything from lexmark/HP/etc. Oh, and a workaround for existing implementations already exists: http://hackaday.com/2013/04/26/cube-3d-printer-hack-lets-you...
Reading over these, they really look like a landgrab on ideas that have been floating around in the reprap forums for a while now.
Here's this from 2008, for instance - http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,8028
Open sourcing needs have nothing to do with altruism, and it's certainly not mutually exclusive with running a business.
The way to think of a provisional is that it's a way to get a description on file by a certain date. Then if you subsequently file a patent application within that time you can refer to the provisional to get the benefit of the earlier filing date. The claims in the actual patent are the ones that matter and they refer to the description in the actual patent. In fact I'm not sure the examiner really looks at the provisional at all, since the claims and description of the patent application itself are what matter in regards to granting the patent.
So what does the provisional do? Example: let's assume bicycle cranks didn't exist and I filed a provisional 1 Feb 2013 for a crank with an odd number of teeth. I just wrote it up in relatively casual style ("a wheel with an odd number of protrusions around its circumference sized such that links of a chain could fit between them, and pedals attached to radial posts").
Then on the 15th of January 2014 I file a patent application for a bicycle crank with odd and even numbers of teeth. My description now takes up several pages and includes drawings done in the crazy style required by the patent office. My provisional just included a hand drawing or two and a couple of sentences of description.
If I tried to sue you over this patent for making bike cranks with an even number of teeth, and you had begun in July 2013, I'd be out of luck. But if you used an odds number of teeth my protection for my granted patent would extend back to Feb 2013.
I could still lose because the casual description might be ambiguous enough that you could convince the jury that it didn't really describe the actual, patented invention. Because of this patent attorneys try to make provisionals as close to real patents as possible, and often urge you to simply skip the provisional step.
(BTW there are domains where patents make sense. Where most NH readers are, in software, I consider patents an abomination).
Source: I have a few patents, and have done this.
The Stewart Platform [0] was invented back in the early 50s, I could apply an SP to any leveling problem. I shouldn't be able to patent leveling anything at this point. Leveling is a solved problem. Putting a computer in a feedback loop is a solved problem, one should not be able to patent feedback loops or computers or trivial applications of both.
1. A startup that is trying to raise some funding is filing the patents as a requisite of an investor (it sucks, but it's part of the startup/investor game)
2. A startup that was acquired by a larger company and the acquirer is trying to protect its shiny new purchase
I noticed Makerbot was acquired by Stratasys last year so point #2 seems likely. These filings are likely to be more on the behalf of Stratasys than Makerbot. Again, I'm not saying it's right, just saying it isn't surprising.
> 2. A startup that was acquired by a larger company and the acquirer is trying to protect its shiny new purchase
In particular, it seems far too common for a patent troll to see a company that just got funded or acquired and figure they can extort some of the new funding. So it makes perfect sense for a newly acquired or invested-in company to spend some of the new funding they just got to set up a small stack of defensive patents or publications.
That said, for both of those cases it would potentially be cheaper and equally effective to file defensive publications rather than patents.
Do you mean a Statutory Invention Registration[1]? That seems almost as troublesome as putting together a regular application, just without some of the followthrough. Or is there actually a solid way to establish prior art just by publishing your method? I've been wondering if there's some threshold of "publication legitimacy" that's required for this, or if posting the method up on pastebin would work. I found a piece on how to establish prior invention for business methods[2], but that only protects the folks that can document their own prior use.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Statutory_Invent... [2] http://www.fenwick.com/fenwickdocuments/new_defense.pdf
Bld3r.com co-founder here.
I started working on bld3r, because i was unsatisfied with thingiverse (owned by makerbot/stratasys). I'd like to see the community put a stop to a potential facebook-like hold on 3D model sharing learning since we are learning makerbot is very rapidly changing their culture from open hardware cultural icons, to an anti-social corporate subsidiary.
I'll hit some fairly basic bullet points:
* We are a functional 3D printing repo and social network, and in the top 3 alternatives to thingiverse.
* We on github (AGPL), and i'd happily accept pull requests: https://github.com/bld3r/bld3r
* We are built on google's app engine, so you can take our site and use it as a base for building your own social network and launching it in a couple hours or a couple of days.
* One major feature is that you do not have to upload 3d models to us. You can if you want, but you don't have to. We'd actually prefer if people host files elsewhere (via dropbox, github, tpb, etc., even thingiverse). You can then submit a link to your object and it'll appear on our front page crowd-sourced with reddit-style voting.
* We do not sell 3d printers, so if you do, we'd love to give you some free advertising while we grow our site. We are currently working on a contest feature, so within a month, if you want to host a contest, you can design what you want on our site, and launch it to promote your printers (Lulzbot was the first of such manufactures to do so, and we are very grateful to them for the notable bump in traffic and name recognition).
There are many more things we do to prevent even ourselves from exploiting a network effect in 3D repos.
We are not without our warts right now (this is neither of our main occupations, it's just a labor of love to keep 3D printing open), but please give the site a visit if you're interested. I live in SF and my co-founder lives NYC. We'd both be happy to get a beer and talk about the site if anyone is interested in using it as a base for another open social network.
As a community, we're lucky that ideas like 'open source' and 'freedom to tinker' are highly valued. Each of us has benefited tremendously from that commitment. But it wasn't an accident. Hackers, scientists and engineers have been fighting mini-battles over those ideas since the days of the 60s counter-culture.
When I stop and think about it, I feel a lot of gratitude and respect for our colleagues who set the precedent for an open Internet so early on. We have an obligation to pay that precedent forward so that technologies like 3D printing and DIY Bio can develop into vibrant ecosystems like the Internet.
1. Patents are very VERY specific. Someone can have a patent for Thing A and you can make Thing B that is quite similar to Thing A, with just a few minor adjustments, and it is not an infringement. This is why there are tons of patents out there that describe pretty much the same thing, with very minute differences.
The takeaway is: just because Makerbot / Stratasys is getting a patent on autoleveling does not mean no one else can do autoleveling. It just means they cannot do it the exact same way.
2. A patent troll is an entity that has a patent portfolio, but has no actual products related to anything in that portfolio. They make their money by suing people (or bullying little guys into settling out of court).
Makerbot / Stratasys makes 3D printers. It is not trolling for them to file patents related to 3D printing technology. You might think the patent system is broken or feel that patent filing is not in the spirit of open source hardware (valid points which I personally share), but it is not trolling.
So, let's not undermine the legitimacy of those criticisms by conflating one particular (arguably douchey) business strategy with patent trolling (another, unarguably douchey strategy).
There was a nice bed levelling project I saw on hackaday a couple of years ago that was cool as well, I think their method isn't covered by this patent either - http://hackaday.com/2012/04/23/automated-bed-leveling-with-o...
Also, the idea of bed leveling using contact force and other methods was discussed in the reprap forums at least as far back as January 2008 - http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,8028
Rational strategy: patent things that you think you have no business patenting. Use for defensive purposes.
If Makerbot starts using such patents offensively, then anger is warranted. Not before.
http://3dprintingindustry.com/2013/11/26/stratasys-throws-cu...
It's an arms race! The system is broken. But I wouldn't blame an individual for picking the right strategy to maximize their chances.
The problem with that is that you don't know whether they'll use the patent offensively or defensively until after it's granted.
Actually, the system is harder now in some ways (and easier in others) because it's closer to "first to publish" than other "first to file" systems:
> an applicant could file a U.S. patent application covering an invention that was the subject of a publication provided the publication was dated less than 1 year earlier. This was true even if the publication was by another individual or entity that independently arrived at the invention on his or her own. Effective Saturday, March 16, 2013, if another individual or entity independently arrived at the invention and published an article before the first inventor filed the first inventor who filed will be unable to obtain a patent.
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2013/03/16/a-brave-new-patent-worl...
A lot of the people calling "end of world" around "first to file" don't really know what the new system means (not their fault, it's complicated!). What first to file does is mean that if you keep your invention secret, you can't then claim it as prior art for someone else down the road or claim that you actually deserve the patent because you invented it first. At least in this way, it makes uncertainties around patents a lot fewer.
http://3dprintingindustry.com/2013/11/26/stratasys-throws-cu...
