We Need Your Help! Join Our Fight To Keep 3D Printing Open

A few weeks ago, we asked for your help to identify patent applications that threaten to stifle innovation in the 3D printing community. Now more than ever, it's critical to make sure the free and open source community and others who work in the space have freedom to operate and to continue to innovate.

With your help, we have identified a lineup of top-priority patent applications that seem both overly-broad and dangerous to the free and open source community. Now it's time to find proof that these patent applicants do not deserve the monopolies they are asking for: that what they are trying to patent was known or was obvious before the patent was filed.

Specifically, we need documents published before the filing date of each application. Web pages, emails, journal articles, or patents are all appropriate documents, as long as they were reasonably public. An email to a friend is not public, but an email to a large mailing list likely is, particularly if the mailing list was open for anyone to join. If the date of publication is not clear from the face of the document,  we'll need to submit evidence of the date for the reference to count.

For each of the applications below, we've described the prior art we think would be most helpful. If you think we're missing something important about one of these applications, don't hesitate to write in and let us know. We're counting on your expertise. Please email [email protected] with any submissions and, if appropriate, let us know which target you think it applies to. Thanks!...