Continuous Composites launched a lawsuit against Fibre Seek.
Continuous Composites is a US firm that developed a method of continuous carbon fiber 3D printing many years ago and obtained a slew of patents related to that technology in the 2012-2019 timeframe.
Fibre Seek is a spinoff of Anisoprint that markets a low-cost continuous carbon fiber FFF 3D printer. Anisoprint had previously developed an industrial-class continuous carbon fiber device, but they’ve since shifted to a lower price point using similar technology with the Fibre Seek line.
The fact that Continuous Composites has launched a lawsuit is actually not surprising: they launched — and won — a previous lawsuit against Markforged, which made its fame by marketing the first commonly available continuous carbon fiber 3D printer. At that time, Continuous Composites’ system was based on resin, not FFF technology.
In a press release, Continuous Composites writes:
“The complaint alleges that Fibre Seek’s products, including the recently launched FibreSeeker 3 continuous fiber 3D printer, infringe ten U.S. patents owned by Continuous Composites covering foundational technologies for continuous fiber composite additive manufacturing.
The lawsuit follows approximately three years of efforts by Continuous Composites to resolve the matter through licensing discussions rather than litigation.”
Continuous Composites has quite a number of patents assigned, and all ten may or may not apply in this case. The strongest case seems to be with US10744702B2, where you can see amongst its many claims that:
- Put continuous fibre inside another material.
- Emit that composite through an extruder.
- Move the extruder while doing it.
That’s pretty much what any continuous carbon fibre 3D printer would do, including Markforged and Fibre Seek.
In other words, Continuous Composites likely has a pretty strong case here.
Where do we go from here? Now that a lawsuit has been filed, it’s very likely there will be meetings between the parties to negotiate an agreement before the lawsuit comes to an actual trial. This is a very typical outcome, where one party agrees to pay the patent owner some amount in order to “license” use of the method.
That’s in fact what happened in the Markforged case. That lawsuit did go all the way to trial, and while many of Markforged’s uses were determined to be not infringing, apparently one claim in one patent was determined to be infringing. For that, Markforged ended up paying Continuous Composites a large lump sum of cash to conclude the matter.
That could very well be the fate of Fibre Seek in this case, but we won’t know until one of the parties explains what happens.
There is a low likelihood of Fibre Seek going off the market, since Continuous Composites would surely make more money by licensing their tech to Fibre Seek than they would if Fibre Seek walked away and stopped selling/supporting their equipment in the US (note, this is a US patent, so elsewhere things are different).
We will have to watch for developments, but in all probability, it will take months or years for this to play out.
