e-ink displays and 3d printing have both convinced me that patents do more harm than good these days.
I work in the display industry. Not for E Ink. But I have no idea what you're talking about. I see this claim about patents on e-ink repeated again and again. I don't know much about 3d printing so I can't confirm. But each time I've seen this patent claim about e-ink, I ask the poster/commenter what specific patent or patents or data they're talking about and thus far every single time they either go silent or get defensive or in rare occasions acknowledge they didn't know about it and just "felt" it was the case. So could you help me out and explain what data convinced you? You can see my comment history to see all my attempts to try to get at what is the actual truth.
FYI, in my experience in the display industry, the main driver of price at scale is the asymptotic cost of components and materials like TFT backplanes, glue, passive layers, coatings, Indium Tin Oxide. Low volumes are what all of E Inks displays except the ones made for Amazon. That matches up with what I see in the prices.
In a competitive market, both are actually true. The fact that there aren't really any major competitors to E Ink in that market indicates however that there probably is some sort of moat (whether it is IP, or otherwise)and that prices are likely higher than they would be in a more competitive market. There are a lot of signs that there is latent demand in the market and lowered prices would lead to an increase in total market volume.
I don't know what exactly you mean in the context of the display industry. What do you mean there aren't any major competitors to E Ink? There's tonnes of display products from lots of different vendors. Are you talking about the electrophoretic display industry specifically? If so, then even there there's competitors like ClearInk but its a niche space with low volumes. FYI, the volumes that E Ink reaches even for what is considered "high volume" by them would be considered unacceptably low volume by LCD manufacturers. Ask yourself a simple question. Are you as a VC going to invest a billion into scaling up an electrophoretic display tech startup that may take 10-30 years or would you rather pump that same money into another internet services? Even Amazon pumped billions into Liquavista and then pulled the plug on it after not being able to scale within the time frame Jeff had given them.
> that prices are likely higher than they would be in a more competitive market.
But how are you substantiating that? Do you have awareness of the costs of materials for electrophoretic panels? Are you aware of yield rates? I actually work in the display industry and I have no actual data on that and I would never be able to estimate even order of magnitude cost without knowing those key numbers. So how are you doing making that price estimation? Your claim is equivalent of looking at a sports car market and saying Ferraris would be cheaper if there were more competitors. I hope my explanation is clear enough to convince you of the fundamental flaws in the arguments being made claiming there is "some sort of moat".
Money Quote: "The Pixel QI license was picked up by John Gilmore, activist, philanthropist, and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has released the patents under the Defensive Patent License."
There are few if any patents involved here -- the problem is that there is just no demand. The moment you show someone the flashy backlighted screen he will go for it 100% of the time and ditch everything else (think: there's a reason people "upgrade" their GameBoyAdvance's to a backlight).
Perhaps if you made a storefront directly illuminated by heavy sunlight...
I generally have rule about being courteous to our fellow HNers and not doing something that could be cited as evidence of willful infringement (and triple damages), but I'll forgo it in this one case with the disclaimer I'll have around it in order to help dispel the rumors going around here that somehow patents aren't at issue. There are also other patents.
= = = = = = A C T I V E P A T E N T = = = = = =
Do not look at this patent if you work in the space of computer display technology.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9075280B2/en
= = = = = = A C T I V E P A T E N T = = = = = =
Starting in 2002 they've done lots just based on these citations of an early patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5930026#citedBy
No, that's a result of low economy of scale. LCDs have a massive market, whereas e.g. big e-ink screens have such a small market they're hand-fitted. You're presupposing your conclusion.
I'm not disputing patents exist. I'm disputing whether they have a noticeable detrimental effect on the e-ink market.
I mean, ARM has a licensing fee (of 1c per CPU), but nobody sane would blame that fee for x86 beating ARM in the desktop world.
>The patent space around e ink is dominated by e ink corp over the last two decades.
I'm not sure what your point here is. Yes, they're putting a ton of money into e-ink R&D. They're patenting everything they come up with, because that's how you monetize your R&D so it's not immediately copied by your competitors without seeing a cent of benefit.
There are companies who have developed alternatives, such as Mirasol. That never took off, despite not needing any e-ink patents. This suggests that e-ink is sufficiently better than all alternatives that it's worth the patent cost - either because those alternatives were impractical, or because the patent fees for e-ink just weren't particularly cumbersome in the first place and the real problem lies elsewhere.
Which brings us back to the central issue:
Do you have any evidence that patents are actually causing problems in the real world, besides "patents exist, problems exist, one must be causing the other"?
And there are many great affordable devices with e-Ink--I have several Amazon ebook readers that I use every day.
I'm not sure I was harmed by any patent.
Many of the things we talk about on Hacker News are covered by patents. Why do you want to shred a piece of the U.S. Constitution (assuming you're talking about U.S. patents) over eInk?
I don't work in the 3d printing industry so I don't have enough knowledge to know that with any level of confidence. It sounds plausible but not sure if it is true. That's why, I am curious whether you do, ie: do you work in the 3d printing industry? How confident are you that the recent proliferation was due to an expiration of a counterproductive patent (which one?) rather than just technologies, volume, demand, industrial production finally coming together and becoming mass market? Has there been any actual detailed analysis or study proving this? The reason I ask is not because I am opposed to the claim, rather I often see unsubstantiated claims like this go unchallenged for a long time. In the case of E Ink, I even saw someone blog that statement and they cited an HN comment about E Ink patents that I had challenged and the poster never responded, and then someone cited that very blog post in another HN comments so it became a circle of references where all the dots on the circle are unsubstantiated.
Being in a adjacent field of other robotic control that utilized 3d printing for our own prototyping before and after the proliferation I can also confirm the patent licensing being a major impediment to proliferation of the technology. We had high enough margins that we could spend $100k on a 3d printer before 2009. But the field has been revolutionized since then from the democratization and even our own processes changed heavily once we could have a bank of printers rather than just one. Sort of like the change of a a company sharing a mainframe with a guy dedicated to keeping it going versus ubiquitous microcomputers.
Here is the patent in question: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5121329A/en
And here's a short explanation of the impact: https://creax.com/insights/the-influence-of-patents-on-3d-pr...
I read the article and came away unsatisfied. I was hoping to see a clear analysis like "here's an inventor who was blocked from producing his product by a patent infringement lawsuit" and here's a series of patent infringement lawsuits that blocked inventors from innovating. Instead I felt the main points were broken due to contradictory statements in the article.
They started with: "Commercialising these kits was actually an infringement on Stratasys’ patent but Stratasys did not stop this from happening."
Which contradicts: "Everything changed by the end of 2009, the expiration date of the famous Stratasys’ patent after 20 years."
I see that Reprap was commercialized in 2006 prior to the patent expiring which clearly contradicts above as well.
There's limited factual data in this article. Claims like "Everything changed" seem like strong claims that ought to be substantiated rather than defended using "feels right" kind of explanations.
https://reprap.org/forum/read.php?1,13528
and that they're more than willing to sue small companies, even after their main patents expired:
https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/stratasys-lands-blow-in-...
They eventually settled that suit because the patents involved were a bit weak, but I doubt they would've settled if the earlier ones were still in force.
I don't know where you saw that RepRap was commercialized in 2006 but as far as I know that's not true. Here's a history of the project by its creators which puts the first RepRap-based company in 2009: https://all3dp.com/history-of-the-reprap-project/
You could probably buy pieces on forums before that but Stratasys wouldn't target individual forum posters with runs in the single digits.
Makerbot, Prusa, Creality, FormLabs, and the other big names in small-scale 3d printing are all post-2009 companies. Here are some more recent examples of patents blocking 3d printing: https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/15/how-expiring-patents-are-u...
The SLA (liquid) section is the most relevant; it mentions how FormLabs lost a lawsuit for building one early. Other companies didn't attempt to beat the patent, but Prusa, Creality, and Makerbot (ironically now owned by Stratasys) all began selling SLA printers shortly after the patent expired. I don't have statements from the executives that they waited because of patent issues, but barring that the situation seems clear.
In the early days, Stratasys and others really did "invent" significant things in the classic sense of the word. We're not talking about "one click purchase" patents here. Allowing them exclusive use of their invention for a couple of decades didn't seem to hurt anyone.
At least it's not as bad as the other IP protections. If the lawyers who brought us copyright law had gotten into patents, we'd be eagerly anticipating the launch of the consumer television.
[0] - An 8039 is a version of the 8048 that was in the original PC keyboard, but rigged up with an external EEPROM for program code instead of the normal mask ROM. They were probably secretly 8048s that were programmed with some other customer's code in the mask ROM, but then fused off for whatever reason.
https://manualzz.com/doc/7345398/atari-slm804-service-manual...
Unlike all the other printers up to late nineties there was no high level computing smarts neither in the printer nor in the dongle. It was a Software Defined printer fully controlled by Atari ST (computer UI froze during printing to maintain tight timings), just like post year 2000 HP LaserJet 1000 and later Windows "host based" non PCL printers. As a result of this Atari ingenuity you ended up with a combo of Atari ST computer, 640×400@71.25 Hz monitor, DTP software (for example Calamus) and a Laser printer costing less than just the Apple or IBM laser printer alone, and as a bonus it printed 2-3 times faster.
So yes, 3D FDM printer at reasonable price was totally possible in late eighties leveraging cheap 16bit computers for control logic.
Regardless of the issues with patents in general, in the specific context of e-ink it's an unsubstantiated myth until someone provides some hard evidence.
E-ink patent speculation is especially problematic because everyone on HN agrees that patents are a problem, so it sounds truthy and people want to repeat it as an example of the evils of patents.
Have you seen any comment that provides actual evidence of causality between e-ink's failure to take off and patent encumberment?