While I didn’t write the article about the NX1 I still ended up looking over the campaign because the low price and fast printing speeds seemed intriguing. I’ll be frank, I wasn’t impressed. Not so much with the technology, which sounds quite interesting. But the Kickstarter campaign itself seemed to be hastily thrown together, had very little documentation of how and why the technology works, only a handful of printed samples and a video that included mostly 3D renderings of the NX1. Those are all things that I see as red flags when I look over a campaign, so when we received the first email from Castanon I immediately started looking closer at the campaign and his claims against NEXA3D.
Castanon claimed that he had registered for a patent months before NEXA3D had registered for theirs and as proof he provided a copy of his registered Patent Cooperation Treaty. Unfortunately the document doesn’t really prove much of anything other than he filed for a patent. It doesn’t include the technology that he is requesting a patent for, nor does it even include the name of his company. The only thing it does have is the name of his patent attorney, who unfortunately did not return my email.
We weren’t the only ones that Castanon contacted either; he hit the comment sections of just about every article written about the NX1, not to mention the Kickstarter forums, and his claims were all the same. Castanon said that he had developed the technology, and that NEXA3D was cloning his technology and even using the exact wording and images. While looking over the specs for both printing processes they are indeed quite similar, but I don’t see any cloned wording or images. While NEXA3D’s LSPc process is quite similar to NewPro3D’s ILI process (Intelligent Liquid Interface) there is nothing that suggests to me that one technology is being stolen from the other. In fact, both processes even seem vaguely similar to the CLIP process developed by Carbon3D.
Video of the NEXA3D LSPc process:
Video of the NewPro3D ILI process:
Video of the Carbon3D CLIP process:
While Andrea Denaro, the co-founder of NEXA3D, didn’t directly address the patent infringement claims being made by Castanon in our interview with him, we did ask, and the company didn’t stay silent on the issue. NEXA3D denied any sort of wrongdoing on their part and completely brushed off Castanon’s claims in an update posted last week on their Kickstarter campaign:
“We have been developing our technology for years and filed our first patents in 2014. I assure you our work is proprietary to what we developed in our own lab and if you compare the NX1 to any other existing or pending patents, you will clearly see our methods are completely different from all other 3D printing technologies – this is how we have a working 3D printer which prints 40 times faster than the competition. We know exactly what we built with our own hands and engineering knowledge and we welcome any challengers to step forward into the light to try to prove otherwise – it simply will not happen, because we are the team that developed 100% of the NX1’s technology.”
I think it is pretty clear that neither company is lying about developing their own technology. It isn’t outside of the realm of possibility that the Canada-based NewPro3D and the Italy-based NEXA3D both developed technology along the same path and one of them just managed to bring it to market before the other. And while both sides are claiming that their business is being harmed by the other, neither company actually has a legal claim to the technology yet. It sounds like this issue will ultimately come down to who wins the patent first, if either of them win the patent at all. We’ll be keeping an eye on this story as it develops, but it is unlikely that anything but a group of lawyers will be able to sort this out any time soon. Discuss this story in the Nexa3D IP dispute forum thread on 3DPB.com.