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The inventions their parent company filed patents for were also very different from the community-invented features that they're suing their competitors over. This is not terribly reassuring under the circumstances.
> Venture-backed companies are generally forced to file patents -- often very silly and overbroad ones -- by their investors, who are alive to the possibility of flogging them off to a troll in the (likely) event that the company fails.
If you're dealing with an R&D focused company, as opposed to a product company, it is essential for investors to require the company to take out patents. Without a patent, an R&D focused company is an empty shell with no assets. All the technology is in a bunch of engineers' brains, all of whom can walk out the door at any moment. If the company isn't successful, without a patent investors are left with no assets of value, even if they produced technology that is itself valuable. Competitors can come along and hire away the engineers or just pick through the publications to glean the benefit of the R&D that the investors may have poured tens of millions of dollars into. And this is also where NPE's show their value: if investors can count on being able to sell the technology to an NPE who might then try and license it out, they are more likely to be willing to invest in the first place.
For a company like Makerbot, patents are going to be essential. Their brand isn't worth anything. They don't have an audience of users that might be disinclined to use a competitor for loss of the network effect. They've got technology, which by virtue of their generally open nature, is easy for a competitor to copy without the R&D effort they had to put into developing the technology in the first place. And as far as I can tell, they're not running a non-profit and have been the subject of tens of millions of dollars in investment.
To me personally there is big difference between spending millions in R&D to develop something novel that would have never happened and spending millions in R&D just to make sure you get there first. I rather have something 6 months later free and clear than having to wait 20 years for a patent to run out.
It's a difference between creating something no one would have otherwise, and simply winning a race to claim property rights on something.
But it's often not clear what the outcome of research will be -- unexpected results can start off as being simply the next iteration of an existing technology.
When you're standing on the shoulders of your users' and predecessors (reprap) design work then I think you should not be able to patent any of your improvements to the work done by those others.
It's a perversion of what patents are intended for. The whole reason they exist in the first place is because of that 'open nature'. The makerbot story is quite a peculiar one, it reminds me a bit of how GraceNote turned on its contributors.
Well, just to make the turtles-all-the-way-down point here, you're really arguing that patents should be disallowed period; the majority of all innovation is constituted of improvements to other people's work.
Not really. I think you can easily special case the classless act of taking a design made by a community which has already stated their abhorrence of patents and then to patent some slight improvements on that design to force that community to either forego your improvements or to buy your product (or license your improvements).
It would be akin to someone adding some improvement to say GCC, and then to stop others from making that same improvement to GCC based on some government entity giving them license to do so.
I can see a few really good cases why patents are useful (even software patents, but those cases are fewer still). This isn't one of them.
This case was more about timing than about actual research, a sneaky trick to stifle innovation on progress that would have most likely happened anyway without MakerBot. Maybe it would have taken a little longer, but probably not all that much.
There are already a ton of patents in the 3D printing field, so people active in that space are walking a minefield already. Makerbot basically joined the opposition on the backs of the community.
Mind you, I think its sketch to do take something community developed and make it proprietary (the old GPL versus BSD debate). But I thought the point of the article was that they didn't do that? I'm kind of taking the article at face value--I haven't been following what's been going on with Makerbot.
I've seen Makerbots response (http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/makerbot-responds-to-critic...), I've read this article, I've seen the patents in so far as I can find them online (all the numbers are here: http://www.makerbot.com/legal/patents/), a good portion of them appear to me (Ex CNC gear jockey / coder) utterly obvious and another bunch look to me as though they are incremental improvements on trends already apparent in the maker scene at the time of filing.
Now that post-takeover (by Stratasys) these patents are used as armaments against competitors is telling. Quite possibly those patents were exactly why Stratasys bought them out.
Personally I think that none of these should be granted, they don't pass the 'skilled in the art' test to me. And I've been long enough out of the CNC world that I probably should not even qualified as 'skilled' anymore, which makes them obvious. The design here reminds me strongly of feed mechanims I've seen in so called robotic 'MIG' welders ages ago, slightly adapted because of the differences in material between what a MIG welder uses (steel wire, or steel wire with a resin core for extra bad quality work) versus ABS filament. 'X For plastic' should not be a reason to patent something in the same way as 'X Over the Internet' should not be.
Re-reading the boing-boing article actually makes it look even more ridiculous, it starts from setting the tone right in the first couple of lines and then goes on to defend the Makerbot patent on the flimsiest grounds. I'm sure Cory is trying to do the right thing here but I just can't agree with his position (which all by itself is curious because I never thought I'd find myself on the opposite of any argument regarding patents, which is a strong indicator I might be very wrong here, but I don't see where exactly that would be. Maybe it is in the timing of the filing of the patent but that does not change my view of the patent itself).
If Makerbot wanted to patent all or part of an extruder/feeder they should have come up with their own novel design without improving on a community supplied one (for reference: http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2013/02/22/replicator-2-extrude... ), and that's just one of apparently 10 or so patents covered. Effectively Cory confirms that, in that he writes that even though there is overlap between the two designs those are not the parts that are patented
FTFA:
"""That is, while the Makerbot patent shares certain features with the community designs, the thing Makerbot is patenting has those features, and some other features ("a bistable lever including a mechanical linkage, etc" as seen in [0068-20]). Makerbot is not claiming rights to the Thingiverse community designs, it's claiming rights over a similar design that specifically has to have a bunch of other stuff added to it. """
That's pretty damning to me, even though Cory seems to think that gets them off the hook.
Anyway, as I said above, it reminds me of the way GraceNote/CDDB turned tables on their community. Even if it's legal it doesn't strike me as very elegant. And in the case of Makerbot it strikes me as decidedly against the whole ethos of the maker scene.
Personally, I don't think the community reaction has been overblown at all. If nothing else, they have acted in profoundly bad faith by soliciting free work from the open hardware community in exchange for the promise of an open hardware business model.
They can't just say "you guys should design a bunch of stuff for us for free, but any minor improvement we make is proprietary and WE'LL SUE YOU INTO THE GROUND IF YOU TRY TO USE IT IN YOUR DESIGN!".
Patents and closed source software are the enemies of the Open Source Hardware/Software movements. They lied about their intentions, and people feel betrayed.
If they had been up front about their business model, I suspect they would have not received as much support from the community as they did - support which was instrumental to reaching the status that they have.
So in software land, we have licenses which include patent protection clauses. It's not particularly difficult for me to release my work under a license that would prevent anyone distributing it from engaging in patent litigation. Why haven't hardware hackers embraced similar practices?
> So in software land, we have licenses which include patent protection clauses. Why haven't hardware hackers embraced similar practices?
Copyright is one of the three main types of intellectual property in the world-wide WIPO system. The other two are patents (hardware) and trademarks. Guess which one gets to trump copyright licensing and exist beyond copyright law?
My guess is that a lawyer (which I'm not) would tell you that the patent protection clauses you refer to only apply to the copyrightable material, and not the inventions themselves (even in software).
I think the disconnect here is that its not unreasonable, illegal, or even particularly surprising that a company like Makerbot might seek these patents, especially in light of their acquisition.
Our (the makers) problem is that it was rude. The community supported them in large part because of their declared support of openness. What they're doing isn't like running a red light because they're in a hurry, its more like farting on an elevator. The backlash is justified.
19 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] thread> Venture-backed companies are generally forced to file patents -- often very silly and overbroad ones -- by their investors, who are alive to the possibility of flogging them off to a troll in the (likely) event that the company fails.
If you're dealing with an R&D focused company, as opposed to a product company, it is essential for investors to require the company to take out patents. Without a patent, an R&D focused company is an empty shell with no assets. All the technology is in a bunch of engineers' brains, all of whom can walk out the door at any moment. If the company isn't successful, without a patent investors are left with no assets of value, even if they produced technology that is itself valuable. Competitors can come along and hire away the engineers or just pick through the publications to glean the benefit of the R&D that the investors may have poured tens of millions of dollars into. And this is also where NPE's show their value: if investors can count on being able to sell the technology to an NPE who might then try and license it out, they are more likely to be willing to invest in the first place.
For a company like Makerbot, patents are going to be essential. Their brand isn't worth anything. They don't have an audience of users that might be disinclined to use a competitor for loss of the network effect. They've got technology, which by virtue of their generally open nature, is easy for a competitor to copy without the R&D effort they had to put into developing the technology in the first place. And as far as I can tell, they're not running a non-profit and have been the subject of tens of millions of dollars in investment.
It's a difference between creating something no one would have otherwise, and simply winning a race to claim property rights on something.
It's a perversion of what patents are intended for. The whole reason they exist in the first place is because of that 'open nature'. The makerbot story is quite a peculiar one, it reminds me a bit of how GraceNote turned on its contributors.
It would be akin to someone adding some improvement to say GCC, and then to stop others from making that same improvement to GCC based on some government entity giving them license to do so.
I can see a few really good cases why patents are useful (even software patents, but those cases are fewer still). This isn't one of them.
This case was more about timing than about actual research, a sneaky trick to stifle innovation on progress that would have most likely happened anyway without MakerBot. Maybe it would have taken a little longer, but probably not all that much.
There are already a ton of patents in the 3D printing field, so people active in that space are walking a minefield already. Makerbot basically joined the opposition on the backs of the community.
http://hackaday.com/2014/05/24/makerbot-files-patents-intern...
I've seen Makerbots response (http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/28/makerbot-responds-to-critic...), I've read this article, I've seen the patents in so far as I can find them online (all the numbers are here: http://www.makerbot.com/legal/patents/), a good portion of them appear to me (Ex CNC gear jockey / coder) utterly obvious and another bunch look to me as though they are incremental improvements on trends already apparent in the maker scene at the time of filing.
Now that post-takeover (by Stratasys) these patents are used as armaments against competitors is telling. Quite possibly those patents were exactly why Stratasys bought them out.
Personally I think that none of these should be granted, they don't pass the 'skilled in the art' test to me. And I've been long enough out of the CNC world that I probably should not even qualified as 'skilled' anymore, which makes them obvious. The design here reminds me strongly of feed mechanims I've seen in so called robotic 'MIG' welders ages ago, slightly adapted because of the differences in material between what a MIG welder uses (steel wire, or steel wire with a resin core for extra bad quality work) versus ABS filament. 'X For plastic' should not be a reason to patent something in the same way as 'X Over the Internet' should not be.
Re-reading the boing-boing article actually makes it look even more ridiculous, it starts from setting the tone right in the first couple of lines and then goes on to defend the Makerbot patent on the flimsiest grounds. I'm sure Cory is trying to do the right thing here but I just can't agree with his position (which all by itself is curious because I never thought I'd find myself on the opposite of any argument regarding patents, which is a strong indicator I might be very wrong here, but I don't see where exactly that would be. Maybe it is in the timing of the filing of the patent but that does not change my view of the patent itself).
If Makerbot wanted to patent all or part of an extruder/feeder they should have come up with their own novel design without improving on a community supplied one (for reference: http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2013/02/22/replicator-2-extrude... ), and that's just one of apparently 10 or so patents covered. Effectively Cory confirms that, in that he writes that even though there is overlap between the two designs those are not the parts that are patented
FTFA:
"""That is, while the Makerbot patent shares certain features with the community designs, the thing Makerbot is patenting has those features, and some other features ("a bistable lever including a mechanical linkage, etc" as seen in [0068-20]). Makerbot is not claiming rights to the Thingiverse community designs, it's claiming rights over a similar design that specifically has to have a bunch of other stuff added to it. """
That's pretty damning to me, even though Cory seems to think that gets them off the hook.
Anyway, as I said above, it reminds me of the way GraceNote/CDDB turned tables on their community. Even if it's legal it doesn't strike me as very elegant. And in the case of Makerbot it strikes me as decidedly against the whole ethos of the maker scene.
They can't just say "you guys should design a bunch of stuff for us for free, but any minor improvement we make is proprietary and WE'LL SUE YOU INTO THE GROUND IF YOU TRY TO USE IT IN YOUR DESIGN!".
Patents and closed source software are the enemies of the Open Source Hardware/Software movements. They lied about their intentions, and people feel betrayed. If they had been up front about their business model, I suspect they would have not received as much support from the community as they did - support which was instrumental to reaching the status that they have.
Copyright is one of the three main types of intellectual property in the world-wide WIPO system. The other two are patents (hardware) and trademarks. Guess which one gets to trump copyright licensing and exist beyond copyright law?
This isn't an explicit answer, but related to your question: http://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/open-source-h...
My guess is that a lawyer (which I'm not) would tell you that the patent protection clauses you refer to only apply to the copyrightable material, and not the inventions themselves (even in software).
Our (the makers) problem is that it was rude. The community supported them in large part because of their declared support of openness. What they're doing isn't like running a red light because they're in a hurry, its more like farting on an elevator. The backlash is justified.