[bryans]

The author claims prior art based on things that were published in 2013, but Makerbot filed their provisional application on October 29, 2012. This also explains why the patent was filed October 29 of 2013, as that would be the last date they can file.

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.

[mr_luc]

First, from elsewhere in this thread, from April 23rd, 2012, there is this auto-leveling technique, which probes by applying a slight current to detect contact:

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!

[bryans]

I don't think you have any idea what my priorities are, you seem to have misinterpreted my point of view, and I find it amusing to be called an anti-hacker for all sorts of reasons.

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.

[sillysaurus3]

It's not right and it's ruining the world, but you have to work within the system until the system changes.

I disagree with anyone calling anyone here anti-hacker. But I just wanted to point out that the above sentence can be used to justify any legal horror in any time. Think of all the atrocities that once were legal. If you think something is ruining the world, that's a pretty good reason not to work with it.

[thedufer]

> What matters more: the future, or your personal notions of what's classy?

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.

[mr_luc]

Well, I did mention what I was interested in: the future.

Viewed in that light, if you take the view that many (perhaps a majority) of HN types do of the stifling effect of patents on industries as malleable as (software/maker/diy), even if they may be acceptable in more staid industries, then a witch-hunt about companies making land-grabs in one of these vulnerable and very important areas may well be worthwhile and beneficial to mankind.

And it's not impossible that it could be beneficial ... and simultaneously classless, and on shaky legal ground. (Although note other comments citing better evidence from April 20th, 2012).

I do think there's something to be said for calling out "this is crazy, we all know the community has worked on X, it would be an obscenity if the desktop manufacturing industry, of all things, got stifled by patents, let's find the prior art and shame the land-grabbers while we're at it." Which is what the original poster is doing, obviously as a very interested party.

I think that's a pretty coherent, and really strong, point of view. I mean, it's desktop manufacturing, dude!

[sutterbomb]

Where do you find the provisional application date? I read the post, and skimmed the linked patent application but never would have found that in the patent application while skimming the filing.

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.

[bryans]

You need to view the actual application to see the provisional filing date.

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.

[lotsofmangos]

"It becomes a witch-hunt when he encourages people to submit prior art to invalidate the patent, thereby wasting everyone's time and money."

If there is prior art that invalidates the patent (and on a cursory examination taking a few minutes, I have found prior art dating back to 2008 that covers the main claim), then it should be submitted and the patent invalidated.

That isn't a witch-hunt, that is the system working, albeit belatedly.

[thedufer]

By giving the wrong date, the author has all but ensured that the patent office is going to drown in completely irrelevant prior art claims.

[lotsofmangos]

Not so sure, when you do a search the good ones are generally long enough ago.

Here's yet another project that covers the same ground from September 2010, for instance - http://pleasantsoftware.com/developer/3d/2010/09/26/keep-it-...

edit - another video of that one, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaEkukmnmK8 and there is also this other thing from 2011, http://hydraraptor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/auto-bed-leveling....

[bryans]

As I stated in another comment, there may be legitimate prior art, but the author did not claim that. He based his claim on art that existed after the filing, and was wrong to do so.

[pyre]

> It becomes a witch-hunt when he encourages people to submit prior art to invalidate the patent

It's curious that you did not justify this statement. The author did not (to my reading) encourage people to spam the USPTO with the same prior art submission that he/she did. I might agree with you that such a move would be counter-productive. The reality, though is that submitting prior art to a patent application is how the system works, so how can encouraging people to work with the system be considered a witch-hunt?

Sure, the author is encouraging people to do so as a way to 'spite' Makerbot, but the end result is that the USPTO has crowd-sourced prior art with which to make an informed decision (and this is not a bad thing).

[rhizome]

Submitting valid prior art is "a witch hunt?"

[bryans]

Neither of the pieces of prior art claimed by the author are valid, which is the entire point of my comment.

[pyre]

The author states:

- Here are a couple of examples of prior art that I submitted.

- Grrr. Markerbot.

- Please submit prior art to invalidate these patents.

You're stating:

- The author's examples of prior art are false because of a misunderstanding that the author has about the dates with respect to the patent application.

- By encouraging people to submit prior art to the USPTO, the author is creating a 'witch hunt.'

A few things to consider:

1. The author is not encouraging people to submit false prior art.

2. The author is not maliciously submitting prior art that isn't. He/she really believed that the prior art was valid.

3. The USPTO is the entity ultimately making the decision here, not the tech community that you fear is swayed by this blog post, nor the author of the post itself.

4. The author is not encouraging the reader to spam the USPTO.

5. The author may be smearing Makerbot's reputation here, but encouraging people to submit prior art to the USPTO really is a side-issue to this, that should end up with zero negative effect on the situation (with respect to the patent application).

[lotsofmangos]

He was perfectly right that there is prior art though, even if his example was flawed.

Reprap huxley video of dynamic bed levelling with z-probe, Apr 20, 2012 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP1ZpHlM6UI

I'm gonna go and start building the giant wicker man now.

[Rantenki]

Numerous patents seem to reference that provisional: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/result.html?sort=relevance&... I am not sure how to get a look at the original provisional application, but it looks like these are extensions on top of the original provision patent application, which could be just about anything, since the other related patents include things like

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.

[lotsofmangos]

The thing is, this stuff has been hashed out in the open source community before Makerbot filed their provisional, hence it was already obvious to anyone acquainted with the art.

Here's this from 2008, for instance - http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,8028

[baddox]

> somebody wants to treat 3D printing as a traditional business instead of altruistically open sourcing all the things.

Open sourcing needs have nothing to do with altruism, and it's certainly not mutually exclusive with running a business.

[danvoell]

Is it possible to include claims in the patent filing that weren't in the provisional? Just curious.

[gumby]

Sure, the chance to straighten out the claims later is a big part of provisionals. In fact provisionals don't even need claims, but for certain international patents to get the filing date you need to include at least one claim to make it a "patent filing" for those countries. Provisional patents are a US specific thing.

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).

[mixmax]

yes it is, but they get their own filing date.

Source: I have a few patents, and have done this.