Encouraging to seeing this at least considered by @Adafruit_Industries .
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/11/27/breaking-news-stratasys-sues-afinia-ramifications-for-the-desktop-3d-printing-industry/
It would be great if Makershed did the same thing.
They can only pause desktop printing. Their patents are mature and their life span ends after 20 years for utility patents and 7 for design. Stratasys can’t stop the maker movement. Only merely cause delays. A few more years and the age of their tyranny will come to an end.
It’s surprising to see Adafruit make these kind of considerations, knowing that they’ve been extremely supportive of Makerbot in the past.
@Thomas_Sanladerer , they were supportive of Makerbot as a startup and promoter of the maker movement. Now that Stratasys has bought them, Makerbot’s primary responsibility is profitability and share prices. But that’s the price you pay when being a public company. As unpopular as my opinion will seem, I think any company has the right to file claims to protect their IP. They invested the research to come up with the novel ideas, they should have the same protection granted to any other patent holder. Stratasys didn’t bother with the maker community before because they probably didn’t realize how much sales they were losing to the lower end printers. On the other hand, if it comes out that Stratasys is simply extorting other companies with scare tactics and invalid claims, then that is just wrong
@Eric_Moy Yes they absolutely have the US “legal” right to bully others with the court system.
@Eric_Moy as I understand it (from reading the complaint, and IANAL), most of the things Stratesys patented had been used in the Reprap community for years, both by individuals and commercial printer companies, before they filed the patent. The fact that they have the means to fund the patent process is the only investment they’ve made.
@Jason_Gullickson , so that is where my patent knowledge gets hazy. I know that as of recently, it’s first to file, not first to artwork, but these patents are older. I’m not sure how that works when the IP should ideally be considered public domain
@Billy , what had meant was that I felt that companies deserve patent protection for their own works. But if these works are in fact from the community, then this is a case of patent trolling IMHO
To the extent that the community had come up with the technology first, released it, and then Stratasys “copied” it, the original work from the community would likely qualify as prior art, and would invalidate Stratasys’s work.
The patent protection runs for the duration that the patent is active; so the recent change to first-to-file does not affect the existing patents. What happens now is that if two simultaneous inventors come up with the same invention, whoever files first gets priority on the patent, instead of whoever had started working on it first. If, in the meanwhile, a third party had also invented the technology, and published it, that work could be used as a prior art that would prevent the first two inventors in this case from obtaining the patent.