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Comment by SequoiaHope | Hacker News Reader

A great example of patents strangling innovation. If anyone has more concrete details on the way this company is holding back this technology I’d love to read details. Thanks!

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The irony is that they are probably limiting their profit too. With lower prices the number of applications would skyrocket and they would get much bigger income.

The only reason I can think of is that scaling the production would be difficult for some reason?

From skimming through their website, it looks like they target business applications with bigger displays (Health Care, Transportation, Industrial & Packaging, ...) which I would assume are high margin contracts.

So maybe another reason would be that offering lower prices for big displays would reduce profits from these business clients more than it would increase profits from the additional low-margin mass-market volumes.

If large screens with a decent refresh rate were readily available and competitively priced, I imagine they'd be a huge hit with devs - I know I'd love one.

The pertinent patents were filed in '96, so it's almost certainly not that?

Last I checked there were over a dozen patents from the 1990s to the 2010s that cover everything from manufacturing to software. IIRC the most important patents actually cover some algorithms on the display controller that won't be public domain until the mid to late 2020s.

Europe doesn't have software patents.

I think non-US space would be enough of a market?

IIRC it gets a bit messy once we start talking about hardware implementations of algorithms. I mean, is an electronics circuit that essentially implements an algorithm still a software patent?

Why does it need to be a hardware implementation?

... because we're talking about software patents?

What makes you think it’s to do with patents? Maybe there’s just insufficient demand.

There is insufficient demand for high priced e-ink screens. Which probably comes down to supply, which probably comes down to patents

I am responding to a parent comment that suggested there was more demand but the company was holding it back. If that is true the only way one company could hold it back is patents.

No. They could just choose not to sell at a lower price. In a frictionless market someone else would step in and sell the good at the lower price, but in reality if not enough people want it then that third party won’t bother.

I don't think the answer is that simple. Would the initial innovation even be worth pursuing if not the existence of patents? Hard to say. At the very lease we do know that in a decade there's no more strangleholds.

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