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?
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.