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Comment by sutterbomb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

"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.

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.

> 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).

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.

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....

Submitting valid prior art is "a witch hunt?"

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

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.

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).

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