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Just to clarify, if you have a problem with what eInk is doing here, then you basically have a problem with patents altogether. This is essentially the prototypical case for patents:

* Invented a novel, physical device[1]

* Granted monopoly from the government for 20 years to extract monopoly rent from sale of the product in exchange for making the design publicly available

Now, personally, I bite the bullet here and say "maybe we should come up with a better incentive system than patents". But I find it hard to fault eInk specifically since this is exactly how patents are supposed to work.

[1] I mention it's a physical device because there are other more controversial types of patents like software patents and patents on genes which are more widely understood to be bullshit.

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I am not sure that is how patents are supposed to work. Few people would object to eInk getting profits from their inventions. But the problem seems to be the strange ways eInk markets their products. It seems to be that they are not encouraging more companies to use their products an rather hold back their technology.

Patents were created as an incentive not only to do research but to publish the results of the research. So that many companies would have access to the technology and can license the patents when producing products based on that technology. That is not quite aligned with a company reluctantly marketing their technology.

Indeed, I don't think it's hard to imagine an alternate timeline where E Ink simply negotiated royalties with a handful of manufacturers over the past 10-15 years and we saw an explosion of e-paper displays as OEMs iterated on E Ink's processes and experimented with more scalable, cost-effective variants.

E Ink could have been the ARM of low-power display technology, raking in a billion dollars a year in royalties while the ecosystem flourished, but they couldn't let go of being the monopoly provider for their technology. What a waste.

I wonder why say, SoftBank, doesn't buy them and do what you're describing?

Is there something commercial players realize about e-ink that the rest of us don't? Or do they lack vision (seems unlikely under current market conditions)?

I wouldn't have high expectations of SoftBank but it does illustrate one key point. Everyone noticed that SoftBank was willing to burn a couple of billion on stuff like WeWork. It is considered reasonable in the VC/private venture industry to take bets on AI/ML, internet services. If those companies fail, nobody is going to fire you even if you vouched for obvious disasters like WeWork. The same VCs would never even consider taking a stake in startups that do the incremental improvements in pieces of display technology like TFT or material science improvements. I work in the display industry and I can only smile when people say it is being held back by patents and stuff like that because the real reason is really about investment.

> Is there something commercial players realize about e-ink that the rest of us don't? Or do they lack vision (seems unlikely under current market conditions)?

What I know is that their technology is limited by the physics of moving large particles. Their volumes are not high enough to achieve high scale. There was another post that explained this very well by showing the multi-billion cost of a typical LCD factory. I think E-ink can only re-purpose existing LCD factory lines and they can't get good yields on their products doing that.

I gotta be honest I'm on a completely different track than this thread: these displays are pretty bad! No one is choosing a 4096 color 2560x1400p 30" with a refresh rate thats so poor they won't share it - its surely measured in seconds.

It's a large color screen with a good resolution, visible from any direction and under any light condition, and which can keep showing an image for an unlimited amount of times.

With a battery and a gsm modem it could probably stay unattended for years as a billboard.

If the refresh rate was improved I would buy it in an instant. I would probably buy a monochrome one. Maybe the refresh rate would have been improved by now had they allowed more innovation in the space.

> had they allowed more innovation in the space.

This has already been covered repeatedly. There's no "had they allowed". The problem is physics! Please read about electrophoresis. It is pigment particles moving physically in a fluid! If you make them move fast then they're not going to be stable. You can look at the past 20 years of electrophoretic products and you'll see that there's been pretty much 0 improvement in speed. Startups like Clearink even gave up on bistability meaning they decided we don't need the pigment to stick, we'll just continuously refresh it like LCD and look how the investor and consumer market treated them.

Again, this "had they allowed more innovation" seems to be coming from people who have little to no knowledge of the industry.

That wouldn't matter for passive information displays. The fact that it only needs power to change what is displayed makes them very useful in any system that displays something (semi)long-term. Think of roadmarkings, parking-space indicators, shop-signs, billboards, carbonmonoxide detectors, road-signals. I can figuratively come up with infinite amount of applications like this. Basically the only bad application is monitors/tvscreens/smartphone screens.

But they are used for that - up until my post this thread was bemoaning that IP law prevents them from being truly successful, i.e. in mass market consumer products

The refresh rate is something like 40+ seconds. This 31" display module isn't a new release of their latest tech, it was released at the same time as their 31" monochrome display module 2-3 years ago IIRC and has been discussed previously on HN.

>I am not sure that is how patents are supposed to work. Few people would object to eInk getting profits from their inventions. But the problem seems to be the strange ways eInk markets their products. It seems to be that they are not encouraging more companies to use their products an rather hold back their technology.

If eInk is really missing out on so much profit from the activities you describe, then a buyer might swoop in and put the company under new management. It's not the patent's fault.

It is the patents fault that the current situation exists. Whether a potential buyer might be able to change the situation is something independent. And of course, after not making a huge business out of eInk in 20 years, it is understandable that the buyers don't exactly line up to buy eInk - if they can be bought at all without the owners consent. The market for eInk devices could be much larger if it hadn't been so much restricted in the last 20 years.

Innovation happened before patents and it's happening fine in industries without monopoly protections, such as food and clothing. There you need innovation And fair prices And good service And availability. You can't just hide behind a protection, extract economic rent and keep everyone else out.

Also countries without strong rigorous patent protections are swiftly outmanoeuvring those with protections.

When copyrights were extended in 1976 and 1998 for example, there was no measurable effect to the amount of copyrighted works being produced. If the incentivize hypothesis held, there should be a measurable increase in the velocity of copyrighted works pivoting on the dates of those extensions. No such increase was observed. Where is the data to back up the claim? There is none.

So the incentivization hypothesis is not only disputed by evidence but also lacks any supporting evidence, so it's incorrect. It's a testable hypothesis that's been tested.

It doesn't exist, no matter how much you close your eyes and think it's true, it's simply not real. Patents and protections simply do not incentivize innovation, the evidence suggests they stifle and hamper it.

No amount of fundamentalist dogma of desperately clutching wrong answers can change this reality.

Patents are broken.

They reward deep pockets, those who have enough money to fight a long, expensive, court battle.

They do not reward innovation. I know startups who have failed to get a patent because their invention was not "specific enough", and some who have failed to protect their invention because their patent was too specific to defend.

They maintain the status quo, which is entirely antithetical to their purpose.

They maybe work in biotech, and other industries where the capital investment is colossal and needs protecting. In most other industries, especially web tech, they're a net negative and need to be abolished.

>They reward deep pockets

>They do not reward innovation.

I suppose, although I think an eink display is reasonably innovative, and I don't think the company has particularly deep pockets in comparison to the companies we generally complain about around here.

Eink is innovative. That doesn't mean patents reward innovation.

As others have said, they're chasing a monopoly on these types of displays, aided by their use of patents. That's not something we should be encouraging. The point of patents was to give a limited window for the inventor of a thing to exclusively capitalise on the thing, in return for making the details of the thing public so that others could in turn expand and improve on the thing. This is not what's happening here.

> They reward deep pockets, those who have enough money to fight a long, expensive, court battle.

You have just described the legal system as a whole.

Yes, indeed. And the legal system is also broken because of it.

> Just to clarify, if you have a problem with what eInk is doing here, then you basically have a problem with patents altogether.

What in the world? So I can't agree that the patent system is net positive, and disagree with a company's specific business decisions under that system?

What a blatant false dichotomy.

Can you elaborate how the patent system is good in general, yet e-ink is abusing it in a unique way? I don’t have a ton of knowledge on patents or E-ink’s business practices.

Answering my own question via a helpful comment I found below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26172785

Surely I'm allowed to be unhappy with the result without claiming to be a legal expert with the perfect solution

>then you basically have a problem with patents altogether

That's correct, I do. Patents should protect the rights long enough to bring a product to market, not stop all competition in an entire field of technology for decades

Patents outlaw thinking.

I think it's worse than this. Patents can reward shallow, crappy thinking. You can patent an idea which you haven't figured out how to build -- which I think almost always means you can patent it before you've finished figuring out enough to make it useful.

In this particular case, I don't think the problem is patents (thought I do have a lot of problems with patents as a concept), rather poor business decisions by eInk.

They are indeed using patents as originally envisioned: They have an effective monopoly on epaper displays. However their poor business decision of ultra-high pricing has prevented a serious market for their product from forming. Had they lowered their price per display, or done some kind of affordable licensing scheme with manufacturers, it's totally possible for them to have made tons of money while still allowing epaper displays to flourish in the market.

But that's not what they did; who knows what kind of money they're actually making, but the fact that the epaper market is basically on Kindle life support isn't the patent's fault.

(Edit: Perhaps Amazon had a hand in preventing wide adoption of epaper, in order to more effectively squash Kindle competitors?)

Yes—-there has got to be more to the story-otherwise they could hire a sophomore Econ major, learn about elasticity, and pull in exponentially higher earnings.

I have seen contracts between large manufacturers where one pre-purchases exclusivity variants, like: 1) Exclusive licensing for x years 2) Exclusive licensing for x years after the first time buyer deploys tech not to exceed W years (usually 10) 3) Very limited sales/licensing to others

This smells like (3) + (2) here.

If eInk is undervaluing their business, why hasn't anyone bought the company and run it better?

You can't buy a business if the owner doesn't want to sell.

> However their poor business decision of ultra-high pricing

I work in the display industry and what I know for sure is that they can't make big 20", 32", 42" displays. Something about factory production issues so they're literally like hand making the big displays which to me seems like the reason why they cost so much. So I'm suspicious of your claim. Could you let us know which ultra-high prices you're referring to? What panel size? What DPI? What bin range and contrast range? Do you actually work in the industry and have knowledge of costs and pricing?

> Perhaps Amazon had a hand in preventing wide adoption of epaper, in order to more effectively squash Kindle competitors?

I'm sorry to be harsh but you sound ridiculous when you say that. And now I'm pretty certain you don't have industry knowledge. You do realize that Amazon spent hundreds of millions trying to scale up Liquavista to produce fast colour displays for the Kindle. It failed because again physics of electrowetting is complex especially when you go from handmaking 100 demo displays to trying to produce 1000 on a rolling production line. Maybe a billion and maybe then they could have succeeded but I guess Jeff had other cost issues or personal reasons that ended that.

I will bite the bullet here. I think the patent system is a net negative, and I think eInk is a great example of how the patent system discourages useful innovation.

I can imagine alternate patent systems that would better encourage innovation. I can also imagine that no patent system at all could work fairly well.

> I think eInk is a great example of how the patent system discourages useful innovation.

Could you explain this? Because which patent is discouraging useful innovation? I'm actively working in the display industry and have no idea what you are referring to. I've asked this question before and I only get conspiracy theory answers like "secret consortium", or lazy answers like patent thicket. If you aren't actually working in the display industry, then how exactly do you know what is blocking useful innovation? Because if you were to ask me what's blocking useful innovation, it is the fact that investors are much more willing to put billions into AI/ML or an internet service startup than they are into scaling up a niche display technology or improving yields so that the price can come down.

I do not work in the display industry, but I can point at the 3D printing industry as an example. Several years ago, some critical patents expired, resulting in a burst of innovation. Or take 2D printers, where parties to giant cross licensing agreements can make printers and it’s very hard for anyone else to sell into the US market.

And yes, if I were an investor in display technology, I would be quite hesitant to touch electronic ink style displays due to patents.

Here’s a fascinating paper on the usefulness of patents:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-03...

> I can point at the 3D printing industry as an example. Several years ago, some critical patents expired, resulting in a burst of innovation

Yes, I've read that as well from magazines but I must admit I've never checked the journalist claims or seen what critical patent expired that made the 3d printing industry flourish. Because it could just have well been access to open source designs that only flourished in the 2000s but I know nothing about 3d printing so I'm just speculating and making it clear that I'm doing that. So when it comes to posts here about my own industry which I feel I know pretty well, I see claims that seem farcical to me so I've been asking, which critical patent does EInk have? So far, I've not had any answer.

> And yes, if I were an investor in display technology, I would be quite hesitant to touch electronic ink style displays due to patents.

If I was your boss, I'd again ask a simple question. Which patent? If you can't identify it, then do you think it is possible it is an incorrect belief based on perhaps a lack of understanding of the display industry?

> Just to clarify, if you have a problem with what eInk is doing here, then you basically have a problem with patents altogether.

Not necessarily; having a problem with the way someone uses a legal property right is not the same thing as having a problem with them having the legal right to do what they are doing, i.e., the property right itself.

"Don't hate the player, hate the game!"

But yes I agree that patent reform is sorely needed, for this reason amongst others. There has to be a middle ground where ideas can flourish while their creators can still extract profit.

Most devices that I can go and buy are covered by patents. EInk does not really have many devices I can go out and buy. I doubt it's due to patents. They just seem to have a strategy of not wanting to sell their products to many people.

> They just seem to have a strategy of not wanting to sell their products to many people.

Alternately, product designers and consumers seem to have a preference for LCD or OLED devices because they are better for common use cases and they have no need for the niche features that EInk provides.

> consumers seem to have a preference for LCD or OLED devices

Have anything to back that claim up, or is this your opinion? Because considering there’s only one major category of consumer devices with eInk displays and they are used in all the leading devices in that category, I’m not sure I personally agree. Without additional product categories available to purchase and because there is a pent up desire to buy them despite them not existing, I don’t feel your conclusion can be proven categorically.

I found the following article by Googling "tablet sales versus ebook reader sales":

"Kindle Sales – The E-Reader Device Is Dying A Rapid Death" https://justpublishingadvice.com/the-e-reader-device-is-dyin...

I'm aware that many people find reading on an E Ink display e-book reader preferable to reading on a tablet or phone. When consumers pull out their wallets to make a purchase, however, they prefer tablets and phones.

E-Readers are single-purpose device. EInk are a screen technology. Comparison to phones only make sense if it was possible to purchase tablets, phones, laptops, monitors with eink screens. There exist some tablets (e.g. remarkable), but they are pretty expensive.

Comparison with phones and tablets makes sense because consumers use them for the same purpose as e-readers, reading e-books. They are an alternative even though LCD/OLED is inferior to EInk for reading in terms of eye strain, etc. People still prefer multi-function devices and EInk has so far been unable to produce displays that are competitive for multi-function devices.

I don’t think there’s a conspiracy at EInk or among its shareholders to intentionally make less money or sell less products. Their annual report, which describes a strategy and goal of improving the technology and expanding sales, suggests the opposite. [0]

[0] https://www.ir-cloud.com/taiwan/8069/irwebsite/financials.ph...

It's pretty difficult to have a preference when one of the options just doesn't exist.

Maybe it's how it's "supposed" to work in principle and by the books they're doing something wrong, but on the other hand, have why haven't other patented technologies ended up in such a limbo state? Lots of tech has been patented, some by ruthless and litigious companies like Apple, and yet somehow there don't seem to be that many broad technologies like electrophoretic displays that have ended up like eInk products.

What makes these displays so different?

(Edit: to be clear, I don't mean to sound snarky or rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious since these displays seem to be in a pretty unique situation)

It does happen to other products. Notably 3D printing was held up by a 1989 patent for 20 years - when it expired in 2009 it resulted in a massive boom leading to lots of new innovations in the space.

I do basically have a problem with patents altogether, but even in the current patent system, the way eInk is doing business is regressive and prevents innovation. They're far more concerned with maximizing their bottom line than actually pushing for adoption of the technology.

Even the founders of modern capitalism warned us of rent-seeking behavior like this that is actually counter to the goals of markets.

It's perfectly fair to condemn this, as well as the patent system that enables and encourages it.

Why is this "rent seeking"? eInk came up with an idea, reduced it to practice, patented that and now have a 20 year monopoly.

What they choose to do with it is up to them. It's a property right that they own. It's specifically mandated as a monopoly power that they have been granted.

After 20 years, anyone can make an eInk display.

You can argue that 20 years is too long, or that the patent is invalid, or that they aren't exploiting their idea in the most community oriented way, but calling this "rent seeking" and "counter to the goals of markets" is flat out wrong.

The "free market" is entirely about each individual making their own behavioral decisions, within the regulations of the market, to promote their own benefit.

You might not like the way the idea of patents has been reduced to practice, but that doesn't make the idea of patents a bad one.

in theory, the patents will allow industries to get an edge in tech and produce better product, and the cost is that some portion of the profits will go to eInk (patent author).

The problem with eink is that patents are not sufficient to produce the desired tech, there is some secret ingredient which is not open, rendering all benefits useless

The key thing with most patents is that the fees have to be "fair" (which is afaik also a legal requirement). In eInks case, the fee seems to be too high[1]. Now, does anyone want to go to court over this? nope.

[1] I'm just judging on the reaction here and on how competitive the prices are

> The key thing with most patents is that the fees have to be "fair" (which is afaik also a legal requirement).

It is generally not. Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing terms are often contractually required from holders of standards-essential parents that are participants in standards-setting organizations responsible for the relevant standards, but are generally not required by law outside of such contracts.

>"maybe we should come up with a better incentive system than patents".

Patents are on ideas. Does anybody in this planet actually believe that, without an artificial incentive, ideas won't happen?

Patents are not on ideas. They are on ideas reduced to practice. If you can find another method for the same outcome, it's not covered by the patent. If you improve on the method , you can patent the improvement and charge the original holder to license it.

The biggest thing wrong with patents are the logistics (lengthy, expensive filings and 20y monopolies are ridiculous today) and the lack of oversight in identitying prior art or vague, overreaching scopes.

Ideas reduced to practice are still ideas. They're just metaideas.

> charge the original holder to license it.

Or the holder can charge so much for their idea that yours, which depends on theirs, is effectively worth nothing because it's priced above its value.

Patents are an extremely strong restriction on freedom, and need an even stronger justification.

That they "might", "maybe", be an incentive to creativity is not exactly a strong justification.

It is highly likely patents are doing more damage than good.

Their justification, at least in the United States is Article 1, section 8, clause 8 of the Constitution:

“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

You can argue the meaning of "limited times" and "discoveries" and the interpretation of all that, but the justification is that by providing a limited monopoly, the inventor gets a period to make money uncontested, after which the invention is available to the community.

The alternative, a "trade secret", means that the invention may die with the death of the inventor and be lost to the community.

I'll just restate:

>That they "might", "maybe", be an incentive to creativity is not exactly a strong justification.

Whereas your constitution quote does express intent, but does not provide justification. It's not backed on hard science, but just a guess.

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