First response from Makerbot (Glitchpudding aka Eric Mortensen is the Thingiverse community manager):
Let’s call it also as a battle of Thingiverse’s future.
Funny, I just went to his website and the examples on the main page look horrible. I wouldn’t buy anything from them just based on that.
And for that overshooted prices… 
Wonder if a kickstarter could be used to raise coinage to hire a lawyer?
@Daniel_Fielding
That’s a gofundme kind of thing.
If they did care they would have responded sooner in a more comprehensive manner. It’s symptomatic of a larger issue Makerbot has had since Pettis was involved. The consumer facing communication has always been poor and in most cases lacks any substance.
I don’t know how many resources they would be willing to put toward doing anything meaningful. The division has been leaking money since they bought it and with few exceptions on matters of much greater concern to the business (not to minimize the impact of this) they’ve been largely uncommunicative and unresponsive.
@dstevens_lv “Big” companies simply aren’t allowed to release public statements on legal matters without going through a process of lawyer review, management approval, etc. It’s completely unreasonable to demand an immediate statement of any substance from a publicly-traded company on a legal dispute between two of its users. Taking about 6 days to release a strongly-worded statement is quite reasonable in my opinion.
“MakerBot is committed to protecting the rights of its community members. In the case of the eBay seller mentioned above, our legal team is preparing communication to the appropriate parties. Since MakerBot does not own the content that our users upload to Thingiverse, we also encourage community members who recognize third party conduct that violates their CC licenses to contact the platforms that are harboring such behavior.”
http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2016/02/24/your-rights-when-you-upload-to-thingiverse
@Ryan_Carlyle Apple was able to release a response to something with far more gravity than CC violations within hours. Makerbot took six days to say nothing. They could have issued that same statement within hours but chose not to.
It’s simply wasn’t on their radar. One of the key issues in the acquisition was the relative lack of not only business experience of those in charge of the original Makerbot compared to the size of the company but the lack of life experience in some of the key managers, most that have since been jettisoned or left. My observations come from four decades in the business world with direct management experience in companies far larger than SSYS, internationals with market caps over US$10 billion. They were good at marketing but not so good at the nuts and bolts of running a company that big. And now SSYS is stuck cleaning up the mess.
@dstevens_lv With respect, I think you’re projecting a general dislike of Makerbot (which is perfectly reasonable to hold!) onto their specific actions here. I agree with your general points about there being a history of crappy user-facing communication, but this is not a good example of that.
People outside G+ only really started talking about this on Friday the 19th. That was also the day someone first posted about it in the Thingiverse Google Group (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/thingiverse/dpSN-6Ub4Ho/YTzBVmv5EwAJ). If you imagine Makerbot is a normal company where most people leave their jobs at work on the weekends, then it’s clear that Makerbot only took 2-3 working days to respond. That’s pretty dang timely for a response to a legal dispute between two users.
The only way they reasonably could have been much faster is if they had an active community manager monitoring this specific G+ community on a daily basis. (Not everybody’s CEO hangs out here like Brook Drumm does.) That would be nice to have, but due to their financial troubles I don’t think actively monitoring all the major 3DP communities is a reasonable expectation.
As for Apple… they have been rejecting requests in the same vein for years. A very similar request was made in October, and the court ruling on Feb 16th certainly did not come out of the blue. It was also a direct court order related to an extremely high-profile terrorism case, which threatens one of Apple’s core selling points. That’s hardly a fair comparison to a sudden viral community outburst on social media about copyrights.