Hacker News Reader

Comment by listerOfSmeg | Hacker News Reader

E-ink is one of those techs that only advanced when large batches of patents expire. E-ink the company has tied up the tech stack in so many patents, NDA's, and exorbitant prices that no one wants to touch it. E-ink the technology wont go any where for 10-15 years when that next big batch of patents expire. Its just like 3D displays and VR there will be a massive consumer push new batches of patents will be filed progress will grind to a halt as no-one can afford everyone else's patent licensing fees on a unproven market until the next wave expires and better products can be built again repeat

View on HN

And this is why patent duration should be tied to product lifecycle length. Pharma where you need 10 years to pull off clinical trials could keep 23 years, but consumer hardware where new generation of devices launch within 2 years should be limited to 10 years. Software should likely be limited to 5 years.

Alternatively, make the cost to renew a patent each year increase exponentially, with the base proportional to the worth of the individual/company filing the patent at the time of filing.

That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time, which is the rationale for having patents in the first place. A company could only afford to hold onto a patent for as long as it causes the company’s revenue to grow exponentially. Once the patented technology matures and growth plateaus, keeping the patent would become prohibitively expensive. This would completely eliminate patent trolls and patent squatting/speculative patents.

Getting exponential curves right is very tricky though (just look at Covid). I believe using such escalating fees would just favor the big companies who can stay ahead of the curve.

Another idea I think worth exploring is mandatory licensing at fixed rates which decline over years and/or are tied to revenue the patent holder generates with the patent. The goal really should be to increase utility of the patent for the public.

> I believe using such escalating fees would just favor the big companies who can stay ahead of the curve.

But that’s fine. If a company can rake in so much money off of one product it’s still providing an obscene amount of value.

No it's not. It just entrenches the position of those who have money, to the disadvantage of everyone else.

No it doesn’t. The whole point of charging exorbitant fees is that the money is being pulled out of the company. That’s the opposite of entrenched.

Right and someone at the board meeting will ask - what if we dropped that 10B annual patent fee.

But it doesn't only apply to large companies. It also applies to small companies. And the point at which the small company will have to stop paying the fee because they can't afford it will be much sooner than the large company. Thus giving an advantage to the large companies.

But that’s fine. If the small company isn’t pulling in a ton of revenue on the product it wasn’t reaching a lot of society.

It doesn’t matter if Google is paying or Widget firm X. Google isn’t going to keep paying if the patent isn’t sustaining itself anymore than Widget X.

Benefits of this proposal outweigh the cons. Average length of patent protection will decrease.

> Benefits of this proposal outweigh the cons. Average length of patent protection will decrease. reply

Why not do that in the straightforward way of simply decreasing the patent protection duration? Or as other people have suggestion: make it contingent on the type of thing being patented.

Because different patents might have vastly different value. If someone has invested a billion dollars to develop some new technology, they might want to benefit from it longer than someone who invested $10k. Yet, this scheme still allows the $10k investor to keep protecting his invention in case it's wildly successful.

> That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time

Actually I think that idea causes the opposite of what is wanted.

A high value monopoly patent will stay locked up for a long time, well after the development costs and risk have been paid off. The consumer is paying high economic rent and the product has less supply.

A low value product is where a longer patent makes sense: the patent gives the inventor time to recoup their costs which otherwise wouldn’t happen.

That said, the world runs at a much faster pace, and patent durations should be decreased.

Software patents should be discarded (because society doesn’t get any value from publishing software patents although society pays high costs for the economic monopoly, and because small startups cannot compete with software behemoths). Unlikely to happen becaus software powers have monopoly profits which can pay to influence legislation or regulators. Also the US is capturing monopoly payments from the rest of the world so the US loves software patents (ironically given some of the historic reasons for the US kicking the British in the nads for independence).

> A high value monopoly patent will stay locked up for a long time

Yes, but this rewards you for inventing something high-value, which is the whole point of patents.

Patents on low-value products largely exist to generate lawsuits against productive entities.

It is not the whole point of patents. They at least ostensibly exist as a trade to eventually make the invention enter the public domain. Per Wikipedia:

> In accordance with the original definition of the term "patent", patents are intended to facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for the common good

The idea is that to avoid companies keeping the details of inventions hidden indefinitely using trade secrets, the embargo period is set up as an incentive to disclose the idea. This is an incredibly important part of the entire social contract of patents. Maintaining a complicated legal apparatus (courts, patent offices, etc.) to defend and enforce these legal monopolies is expensive and is paid through public funds. Thus a public good is expected in return. A system that allows the most important inventions to stay locked up forever seems to go against the spirit of this entirely. Perhaps you think that this has its own merit, but it is certainly not the intended purpose of the patent system.

An exponentially growing annual fee is also a great way to fund public goods.

For example, if you increment the exponent every three years, a $20 initial fee would cost half a billion dollars annually after 20 years. That buys a lot of school supplies.

>the cost to renew a patent

Why do you think patents can be renewed?

GP probably meant maintenance fees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintenance_fee_(patent)

Would be nice to see increasing annual maintenance fee. 1K for first year 3K for second, 10K for third and so on. After 6 years or so you either make/pay millions of give it up.

Should drastically reduce the amount of junk patents. It it's not worth at least a few million not worth applying.

Yeah, sounds cool. That way ma & pa lose their patent right away and Google keeps it forever.

I’m so dumb - this never occurred to me, and I’ve never heard anyone express it this way. This makes so much sense. Thanks.

This would most probably benefit big cooperations more than smaller ones as they can use money to speed up RnD and time to market. I can think of 1000 ways to make the patent system more fair but also 1001 to game each approach. It's a tough but to crack.

What perplexes me more is not the patents (since they are public information), but the NDAs. They could've kept the underlying technology and manufacturing process patented, while at the same time selling mass quantities of the displays to everyone who wants to buy some and freely publishing all the information on how to drive them (which actually turns out to be not that difficult.) I bet that would actually get them more profit than the situation today.

That has not stopped the more creative and resourceful individuals, however:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124086

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGVZCEuoccE

Don’t forget 3D printing that also only really started when patents expired.

Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing. Orthogonally, ever wondered why memory on your PC is so expensive? Thanks to Micron, Hynix and Samsung triopoly.

Can you elaborate on the memory pricing?

Here's an article from 2011 doing Moore's Law extrapolation of RAM and disk prices: https://antranik.org/using-moores-law-to-predict-future-memo...

RAM, 2011: "A single 8GB stick of RAM is about $80 right now. In 2021, you’d be able to buy a single stick of RAM that contains 64GB for the same price."

Disks, 2011: "The price of a 1-terabyte hard drive is $80 now...

In 2013, a 2TB drive will be $80.

In 2015, a 4TB drive will be $80.

After that the doubling rate may lengthen to 3 years instead of 2 years so..

In 2018, an 8TB drive will be $80. And finally in 2021, for $80, you’d be able to buy a 16 terabyte hard drive"

Is applying Moore's law relevant, since the manufacturing process of DRAM is hugely different from the one for usual chips (limited by capacitor size, not transistor one) ? Same goes for hard drives. Not saying that price gouging has nothing to do with this, but simply saying "Moore's law was not followed" does in no way imply something interfered with it.

I don’t think it’s fair to expect hard drive capacity/$ to grow exponentially forever.

Certainly for consumer hard drives, there’s a cost of getting the drive to the customer (transport, shop rent, employee salaries, etc) which is, at best, fixed.

If manufacturing costs drop to zero, price will approach that fixed cost (plus any markup sellers manage to extract, for example by marketing their drives as better/more hip/etc.)

For the record, it's 2021 and the cheapest 16tb hard drive on pcpartpicker is $335. For $80 you can get a cheap 4tb hard drive.

When I was a kid, me and a friend would be amazed at a 25,000 dollar 1 TB multi hd array.

We couldn’t imagine how anyone would ever need so much space.

Moore's law was (1) an observation of historical data and (2) never a guarantee by vendors to make higher capacity products at lower prices. The extrapolation is just nonsense wishful thinking.

lcd screens didn't fall in price because of an international criminal price-fixing conspiracy. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT-LCD_(Flat_Panel)_Antitrust_Li...

But isn’t it those same companies that are the reason that memory isn’t $1000/megabyte?

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say here. Are you implying that they could price gouge even more than they already are and are keeping prices relatively low out of the goodness of their hearts?

I think their point is that these companies gave us cheap memory in the first place. Which is an important thing to remember. The distruptors of days past are the monopolists of today. And they themselves will be disrupted one day.

> The distruptors of days past are the monopolists of today. And they themselves will be disrupted one day.

I can think of a few that can’t be disrupted soon enough.

They're saying it used to be that much, and now it's orders of magnitude less, thanks in part to those companies.

I am not sure if I understand your point.

> Orthogonally, ever wondered why memory on your PC is so expensive? Thanks to Micron, Hynix and Samsung triopoly.

Should have mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing. It's not just speculative.

Just to play devil's advocate, that's the whole purpose of patents, to prevent progress by others.

On the other hand, the gain is that E Ink Corporation decided it was worth investing in developing and commercializing the technology knowing they'd have exclusive rights for 20 years, and quite possible only because of that. If they didn't have that guarantee, it might not have been worth any company developing it in the first place.

Now I'm not familiar with the history of investment in e-ink specifically. But I'm curious if there's anyone here who is: if patent protection wasn't available, would it have been worth it for any company to develop it, knowing it might be copied a year later by a competitor who would then undercut the original inventors (not having to pay for the expensive R&D)?

It’s important to remember every laws has trade offs, including patent laws. Perhaps patents stiffened e-ink but OP seems to have issue with patents in general which it would be hard to argue universally prevent innovation.

The purpose of patents is to give innovators a temporary competitive advantage, by forcing competitors to pay royalties for the patent.

The main problem is "temporary", as patents have a flat duration but fields innovate and turn over at different speeds - compare web software to aeronautics/NASA software. The former could potentially he outdated within months, the latter likely won't be used until it's been tested for decades.

So obviously a 30-year patent is potentially paralyzing in webdev, yet might even be too short in space tech!

The problem is there simply isn't any duration that can satisfy both fields.

Meanwhile, often patents don't benefit anyone because they're 1) more trouble than they're worth to actually enforce, and only serve to reinforce the incumbents who don't need them, and 2) are in some cases deliberately written to be meaningless and uncommunicative, which defeats the purpose of open publishing in the first place.

Every law might have upsides, but that doesn't change the fact that patents are fundamentally flawed.

Your response makes me think of the phrase “More Perfect”.

Agreed, patents are flawed. But so is basically every law in the United States. However, laws can change and we have influence on that so rather than chalking the idea of patent law as “fundamentally flawed” let’s look at ways we can tweak the existing system to work better for everyone.

For example, one commenter had an interesting suggestion of increasing the patent fees exponentially over time incentivizing only orgs that are using the technology and disincentivizing trolls long term.

It that tweak perfect? of course not, but rather than viewing it as an all of or nothing game of us vs them let’s keep working together to make it “more perfect”.

> Just to play devil's advocate, that's the whole purpose of patents, to prevent progress by others.

Not really. The "societal" purpose of patents is to promote innovation. That's really the yardstick by which most of the conversation around patents needs to be measured - does this help or hinder overall innovation.

There are also moral/philosophical arguments for or against patents, but I think the majority consider the societal impact to be the most important.

The mechanism by which patents achieve this is by giving a temporary monopoly to the inventor. It also requires the inventor to disclose, in detail, how their innovation works ; that's part of the tradeoff - the innovator gets a temporary monopoly, but society benefits by the innovator not hoarding it as a secret. This should actually encourage progress by others, in the long run.

Patents have stalled technology in many areas since a long time. The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" [1] by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine analyze the economical impact of patterns on society. They give some surprising examples, like how the Wright brothers invested heavily in patents and legal actions to stiffle competition instead of continuing development of airplanes.

[1] http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

Firearms industry had this as well. Smith & Wesson for the longest time fought tooth and nail to be the only revolver manufacturer in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

> E-ink is one of those techs that only advanced when large batches of patents expire.

I don't really understand how this is true. If I google, I don't see any evidence that any patent or block of patents is blocking the "tech". Could you specify which specific patent is blocking?

> tied up the tech stack in so many patents, NDA's, and exorbitant prices that no one wants to touch it.

But... you do realize there's lots of startups that enter the bistable display space? eg: ClearInk. https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/ They even use the exact same underlying principle which is electrophoresis.

If you go to any display conference you'll easily see that most of what you're saying comes across as highly inaccurate or even ridiculous.

There's something very fishy about ClearInk.

I checked their website to see what their technology looks like. I wanted to see how their product compare to a eInk screen use in many devices (such as Kindle/Kobo/ReMarkable), as this is the kind of products that interests me. It turns out that all the pictures shows the back of what I expect to be tablets/phone prototypes (or maybe it's just stock photos), and not a single time the screen.

It's almost comical : you advertise for a screen tech, but you carefully avoid to show how such screen looks like. Definitely a red flag.

> It's almost comical : you advertise for a screen tech, but you carefully avoid to show how such screen looks like. Definitely a red flag.

Are you an E Ink employee or something trying to badmouth clearink? Because you can just go to youtube and search clearink and find clear videos of their products from various conferences.

I'm not related to any of those company in any way. I do not work in this field, and to be quite honest, before your comment, I did not even know about ClearLink.

I've highlighted something that makes no sense. Do you expect a car manufacturer not showing one of its cars on its website ? Apple not to how its iPhone ? A SaaS company not showing screen captures of its product ? I don't. Those images should be easily available without having to browse YouTube, or do a search on google.

FWIW, I would actually welcome any concurrent to eInk and its monopoly. I totally share the point of view of the top comment, as I've seen this tech stagnate for years. Most of the supposed alternatives 10 years ago(PlasticLogic, Liquavista, Mirasol, etc.) either never produced something relevant, either failed the expectations.

I actually find your comment quite disrespectful: if you want to promote a product, you can do that without having to resort to ad hominem attacks.

Anyway, thanks for the YouTube tip: I was able to see what I wanted to see.

Edit: if some employee of ClearInk see this message, do yourself a favor and update your website with some pictures of your product, or even a embedded Youtube video. It will speak more than stock photos.

Speaking of that, I’d love to get an alert whenever a major patent like that expires. It would help predict the tech landscape a few years out.

Anyone know of any major expirations in the next few years?

The trouble is knowing what patents are "big". There are few good signals for patents that are holding back innovation.

I'd love a newsletter that tracked what patents were expiring on any given week. I'm pretty ignorant of what's coming down the pipeline from a legal perspective.

Another example of how IP laws have become an enemy of the goals society had when passing them, which is not to enrich a few corporations but to incentivize innovation, but now it is clear copyright, and patents today are doing far more HARM to innovation than they advance it

As such we as a society need to look hard at those laws and policies to reform them

Sadly the large corporations have a huge amounts of lobby money and are rapidly attempting to get the terrible IP laws codified into complex international treaties to ensure no nation can do any reform at all

I strongly disagree about patents. This is the patent system working as designed. It incentivized a company to invent a new thing, and gave them a monopoly for a reasonable amount of time (20 years). When it ends, others can operate in the space.

I agree about copyright, though. Copyright has been expanded to cover software and even APIs. Copyright is a giant drag on innovation. A single company can tie up a space for life of the author plus 70 years, which is absurd. Copyright should never have applied to most forms of software, which clearly fall into the exceptions of 17 USC § 102(b). But we are where we are.

Clearly it is not, e-Ink, 3d printing, VR, and hosts of other technology has been held back not advanced because of patents

Now that is not to say I would advocate for complete removal of the patent systems but I do think Compulsory FRAND style licensing should be a requirement of obtaining a patent

Your distinction between Copyright and Patent is also strang as the suffer from the same flaw so it seems your only justification is that you believe 20 years is "reasonable" but Life is not

I think both are unreasonable, I would personally like to see both dropped to 10 years, or some compromise where you get 2-3 years exclusive use of the creation then have some kind of compulsory license where the creator is compensated but can not with hold the creation for 20 years (with some kind of scheme that the license be fair and equitable)

Held back might be the tradeoff we have to pay for letting them exist in the first place. Developing new technologies is not cheap or trivial- especially hardware innovations. I'd rather have a delayed 20 year start to fast e ink innovation than have e ink never get the r&d funding needed to get past the valley of death and make it to market in the first place.

These companies didn't make money on patent licenses, they made money on selling the stuff. More money than they should, because they used patents to limit competition.

Patents can be useful as an incentive, but their length need to correspond with the pace of progress in a given field. Otherwise, they end up slowing down everyone.

Other than the false equivalency of your argument, you would also have to prove the technology would not have been completed with out the patent, I think that is a hard conclusion to draw given the amount of other progress we have made with out such consideration (i.e see FOSS )

Once you have proven the need for an exclusivity grant, You also need to prove that 5, 10, 15 years of exclusivity via a patent would be unable provide enough incentive, that it had to be 20 years to strike the proper balance

In today's fast moving society, I think 5 years would provide more than enough incentive even for expensive technology that requires lots of capital investment though I would favor a shorter exclusivity grant, and then may be longer required licensing grant. like 2-3 years of exclusive use, and then 10 years of licensing but the patent holder is required to treat all uses of the patent in the same manner with fair and non-discriminatory pricing.

20 years is not a reasonable amount of time for technological products in current times.

I think 20 years might be a reasonable amount of time for hardware, which requires a heavy outlay in money to produce and which does not have almost zero cost to replicate, but not for software which can generally be copied for nothing and does not cost much to produce.

Hardware, 20 years?

20 years ago, Nokia 3310 was released.

For consumer hardware, that's still a very very long time to hold a patent on something.

Specialized scientific/industrial hardware, maybe... consumer goods... way too long.

But that's just my personal opinion.

Did the Nokia 3310 have any hardware patents related to its release?

I was just saying that 20 years ago is "old".

Nokia probably had a gajillion GSM patents that they used to make the phone, and a bunch of other companies had to pay them money for many years to build 2g/GSM phones.

Qualcomm and a few other companies have a bunch of patent for 4g tech, so even now (when we're rolling out 5G), it's practically impossible to make a modern...ish modem without giving atleast some money to one of those companies, and 4G is "old tech" already.

One thing that has allowed 4G to expand radily is the fact that those Qualcomm patents are under a FRAND agreement in exchange for them being including in the 4G standard.

FRAND is not with out its own problems, but it is alot better than the situation with eINK or 3-d Printers where there is not FRAND agreement

Facebook is only 16 years old. Think about that. 20 years ago everyone was using 56k modems and JS barely existed.

20 years is an absurdly long time in tech

22 years ago, I had a 8mbps DSL connection, and a significant part of urban Japan already had 100mbps.

On other hand, America had more fibre than any other nation, but its hyperregulated telecom industry only managed to cross 10mbps averages 10-8 years ago.

There is also an issue of maintainability and spare parts. For example, the technology behind how phone screens work is broadly understood, leading to people being able to replace their phone screens if they are broken or no longer working. There is no such thing for Kindle or e-readers more generally, because a lot of this is hidden in patents. so if you're a consumer and want to purchase one, and it breaks somehow you're SOL.

Well there haven’t really been any competing technologies either. Maybe tcl nxtpaper will push eink forward. Or ultimately kill it

> as no-one can afford everyone else's patent licensing fees

A patent deadlock.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com