Continuous Composites’ new patent lawsuit against Fibre Seek looks a bit different once you examine the company’s recent financial troubles and the legal battle with the lawyers who won its previous patent case.
Continuous Composites, or “CCI”, has been developing continuous fiber composite 3D printing technology for many years. Its patent family goes back all the way to 2012, although the individual patents themselves were granted over a much longer period afterwards.
The company’s best known technology is called “CF3D”, a robotic process that combines continuous reinforcing fiber with photocurable resin and deposits the material along programmed paths.
Fibre Seek, while also producing a continuous carbon fiber system, uses a somewhat different approach. The Anisoprint spinoff markets a pretty affordable desktop 3D printer that combine pre-impregnated continuous carbon fiber with thermoplastic material at the printhead. You can print very strong parts with this system.
At first glance these seem like very different machines, but CCI believes Fibre Seek is infringing one or more of their patents.
Another Patent Battle Begins
CCI filed suit against Fibre Seek and related parties, alleging infringement of ten US patents covering continuous fiber composite additive manufacturing.
One of those is US10744708, which describes deposition of a continuous strand encased in another material while an extruder moves along a path. Other mentioned patents go further and describe pre-impregnating a continuous strand with one polymer before combining it with another polymer during extrusion.
That last point is interesting because Fibre Seek’s own process uses continuous carbon fiber already impregnated with thermoset resin, then combines it with a thermoplastic during printing. That’s a bit different.
In other words, Fibre Seek can reasonably argue that its desktop co-extrusion approach is technologically quite different from CCI’s large robotic UV curing system, but that might not be sufficient to avoid the patent claims.
CCI has already demonstrated that point once. The company sued Markforged in 2021, eventually winning, with a jury finding that one claim of one patent was both valid and infringed. The dispute ultimately ended with a US$25 million settlement and cross-licensing arrangement.
That history gives CCI considerably more credibility. Their patent was successfully used in an infringement case.
There is, however, another side more interesting to this story.
A Company Under Financial Pressure
CCI is currently being sued by Lee & Hayes, the patent law firm that represented it in the Markforged litigation.
The dispute concerns how much Lee & Hayes should receive from the Markforged proceeds. In such cases, the lawyers typically take an agreed upon slice of the award amount. A federal judge has already determined that CCI breached its fee agreement, although the final damages have not yet been established. Lee & Hayes claims considerably more than CCI believes it owes, particularly because the ultimate Markforged settlement was larger than anticipated.
More interesting are some details that emerged during that case.
Court records describe CCI as struggling with financial issues and maintaining its viability during 2024. They also reveal that Markforged CEO Shai Terem offered to acquire CCI for US$10M shortly before the Markforged dispute was resolved.
CCI rejected that offer and later agreed to the much larger US$25 million settlement.
This provides some context for the Fibre Seek action.
CCI seems to have valuable intellectual property in the form of those patents, but commercialization of its own CF3D equipment has apparently been quite limited compared with the thousands of machines shipped by companies such as Markforged.
Patent licensing and enforcement could therefore be an increasingly important part of CCI’s business. Could their patents be worth more than their own equipment?
That does not mean the Fibre Seek lawsuit was filed simply because CCI needs money. There is no evidence for that motive, and CCI says licensing discussions with Anisoprint began around 2023, before the dispute with Lee & Hayes came up.
But financial pressure can certainly affect corporate strategy, and CCI now has both a successful patent enforcement precedent and a portfolio it appears willing to use in the courts.
Fibre Seek’s foreign ownership does not change much in this case because they’re selling equipment in the US, where the patents are enforced. US patents can be enforced against any company making, selling or importing allegedly infringing products into the US market.
The big question here is whether Fibre Seek’s specific implementation matches CCI’s patent claims. It’s by no means clear which direction this case will take, but it will certainly be interesting to watch.
Via Continuous Composites, PRNewswire, Google Patents and Spokane Journal
