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.