If Makerbot did base the work that they have been trying to patent on Creative Commons licences, would that be a valid reason to have the patents invalidated and sue them? Just curious.
We could check into financial backing from any Creative Commons association if there is actually one.
Tough. CC is about copyright. Patents are a completely different regime. AFAIK there’s no patent clause in CC. The GPL and a few other open source licenses do care about patents. But CC doesn’t. IANAL, this is no legal advice, ask a real lawyer, yadda yadda.
I was going to respond to this post but the response started getting too long, so I posted it here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielPorter/posts/dJ7igBBANjm
I’d like to see some open source licenses that revoke themselves (or at least change license terms, like switching to non-commercial) for any person or organization that holds patents 
I do not see how you could patent something in violation of a licensed work without summoning lawyers to sue you.
@NathanielStenzel Because copyright, patents and trademarks are often subsumised as “Intellectual Property” where in fact they are totally independent regimes.
You cannot copyright a chemical process and you cannot patent a poem.
When publishing a construction drawing (say, as a OpenSCAD or STL file on thingiverse, you can license the file. When I use that file to print an object, your copyright doesn’t automagically extend to the object itself.
If I then take said object as part of an invention I want to patent, you are technically not even prior art because your STL file is just that - a file.
Now this is not 100% legally correct, but it should give you some thought for food about the difference between patents and copyright and the problems caused by mixing the two regimes and think of them as one thing. It simply doesn’t work that way.
To overcome this, people like Stallman have added patent clauses to their copyright based licenses like the GPL. It’s more of a hack and not a real solution.
@Jan_Wildeboer With so many things existing in a non-physical form, I find such logic as what you posted as just wrong. Therefore if the courts think that way, they are just wrong. A patent is protection of an idea. A file can hold an idea. A rendering is art. Everything online is one or more files.
@NathanielStenzel I know, and I agree mostly. But that doesn’t change the law. I have been fighting software patents now for well over 12 years. I know quite a lot about the topic and its global implications. It’s a mess. But we have to live with it for the moment. Changing the global policy on patents and copyright is a huge task. We are working on it. But it takes years.