Comment by robinsoh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robinsoh | Hacker News Reader

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> (Immediately checks for author affiliation to eInk or some bullshit mid-tier American university with an "up and coming" tech transfer office) Awesome, maybe this will actually come to market with a reasonable license fee!

Uhm... I just want to say that I work in the display industry and have never heard comments like yours from my peers, or during conferences. Is there some unreasonable license fee going on that those of us who actually work in the display industry aren't aware of? The main place I've seen this refrain is repeatedly on HN including a HN comment that got cited by Boing Boing and blogs and then subsequent HN comments that cited those blogs and Boing Boing as their refrence. 1 Infinite Loop! Please have a look at my comment history as I keep asking about which patent or Eink misbehavior people are talking about. I'm still trying to figure out if the issue is real or some kind of Dunning Kruger effect from software people frustrated about the "slow" progress in displays. This would be the equivalent of a bunch of my display industry people coming on our display industry forums claiming that Google is blocking search engine progress, refusing to license search engine technology, and blocking technology from progressing and then justifying that claim by then giving you a set of Google patents and then shouting, see there's the clear proof that Google is a bad actor. I hope the analogy is clear and that it is also clear why I remain unconvinced about both!

I don't have a horse in this race, but I have often heard in these threads the rumor that the reason the Remarkable E-Ink tablet cannot be fully open-source is due to restrictive licenses for the E-ink technology they use. Basically people are upset (understandably) that they're holding this amazing technology in their hands but are not free to use it to its full potential, as the actual Remarkable software is pretty limited, despite running on Linux. I don't have any idea of whether this is really true or not, but at least it's a falsifiable claim that might help you or someone knowledgeable pin down the origin :)

> but I have often heard in these threads the rumor that the reason the Remarkable E-Ink tablet cannot be fully open-source is due to restrictive licenses for the E-ink technology they use.

isn't the founder of Remarkable an HN user? I am interested to knoww for sure if this is a fact. Is EInk is violating on infringing upon the GPL?

> Basically people are upset (understandably) that they're holding this amazing technology in their hands but are not free to use it to its full potential,

I think my understanding of the technology and its potential is different than what marketing people may be saying. Let me paste what I wrote before about it.

"

I work in the display industry. My take is neither will happen. Lets start with B.

> B) Color e-ink displays get good enough for interactive use, movie watching, etc.

There is no commercially sold genuine color e-ink today. Kaleido is a grayscale e-ink with a color filter laminated on top. Kaleido Plus is just the same with a light guide.

E Ink did show off a genuine color display back in 2018 called Advanced Color and marketed as "Gallery". But it would take 30s to display an image and it was 32 colors or 16 colors. Not 16-bit color. I mean only 16 colors. E Ink tried to get the industry to buy in and start making products using this technology but nobody really signed on. They revamped their production to then start producing 7 color panels in much smaller sizes like 5" for signage. I heard that hasn't hit the numbers they needed to even cover their RnD costs. I doubt it will be a commercial success.

When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable. You'll never be able to get both. That's why newer technologies by various startups like ClearInk sacrifice the bi-stability in order to get fast video speeds. But look at the market response, the market isn't exactly embracing that either. Venture capitalists aren't exactly eager to fund the billions needed to create new display tech when they could invest in some new internet services startup or AI/ML startup instead.

As for A), these are all emissive technologies. They will by their physics always be distinguishable from paper. As to whether you'll care or not, that is something I can't predict.

"

> When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable

Do you remember mirasol display? You don't necessarily need pigments to produce colours.

> > When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable

> Do you remember mirasol display? You don't necessarily need pigments to produce colours.

I hope you can see the main part where I specifically stated we are talking about electrophoresis only. If you want to start including interferometry then that's a different topic. There's sadly, good reasons why Qualcomm killed Mirasol. But that's another story for another day.

Is it just a long story or you have an NDA?

You can run arbitrary software on the Remarkable, in case you weren't aware (quite easily even, you can ssh in out-of-the-box)

The supplied software isn't all Open Source, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some drivers or firmware that can't be Open Source on it. But I don't see how it even _could be_ the e-ink part that's forcing the main UI software parts to be closed source.

Found the eink employee.

Kidding! You do make some interesting points re: licensing and patents and such.

I think the complaint I hear leveled, is that there is a patent, and it is licensed, but at exhobrinant cost.

Thus, eink is "too expensive" for true derivative innovation, and even widespread sale.

You might do better to speak to that accusation directly.

In high school economics, we learned of min/max pricing theory.

If you price your widgets at 100 dollars profit per unit, you'll sell 10 of them a year. If you price them at 1 buck per, you'll sell 1000.

But... you'll have additional support costs, returns, other ancillary costs when selling 1000 units compared to 10. So at the 1 profit price point, you need additional staff, larger facilities, more manufacturing capability, etc.

Sometimes, licensing is like this. Fewer units sold, but better profit.

Maybe the eink lads believe the tech can never scale beyond niche, won't take off, so are just milking the market at the highest licensing fees they can get?

Maybe even raw licensing, without per unit sale fees? Thus, higher up front costs, as no confidence i sales numbers? Plus no internal audit costs with licensing, sales, compliance?

Just thoughts on why the high licensing costs, may be true.

> You might do better to speak to that accusation directly.

That's the thing. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the accusation is. So far, every time I've challenged comments made about this, people have been vague and unwilling to state anything verifiable. To be frank, I don't even think any of the people making those comments are actually display people.

> Maybe the eink lads believe the tech can never scale beyond niche, won't take off, so are just milking the market at the highest licensing fees they can get?

I don't even know what the meaning of "eink licenses their technology" would mean. That's way too vague. It would be the equivalent of saying "Samsung Displays licenses their technology". All I know is that Eink sells electrophoretic FPL and then their various partners produce things using that FPL. You can buy miles of their FPL if you want for dollars per yard or something like that. You can drive it using your own tech, laminate whatever backplane you want to it. What I know for sure is the high volume displays like the ones that go into Kindles are cheap, and everything else is like 10x more expensive simply because they're so low volume they might as well be hand assembled.

As a fellow display engineer, thank you.

The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself; and so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.”

They believe that, without those patents (or if those patents were instead in the public domain), companies that produce traditional display panels (like yours!) would be competitively iterating on electrophoretic display-panel technology in the process of manufacturing their own to sell into the market (either vertically-integrated, or as panel wholesalers), the same way they competitively iterate on LCD and LED-based display panel technologies; and that this would presumably produce market efficiencies that aren’t currently there.

There could also be vertically-integrated niche panel+display companies focusing on niche use-cases, targeting a given vertical and doing “market education” for that vertical, creating demand for e.g. electrophoretic billboards, that isn’t currently there, “inventing the market” for themselves where each of these niches can eventually be a high-volume product of its own.

And that would in turn drive additional innovation, as each of these companies would have a healthy margin to plow back into R&D.

I think the intuitional belief behind this is that the blocking factor from this virtuous cycle beginning, is the fact that the entrepreneurs considering starting these niche companies, and the display bigcorps considering getting into this space, both consider that — when per-device patent licensing costs are included — the market is too low-margin to bother entering, even to chase a greenfield vertical. It only becomes “worth it” without the licensing fees.

People’s intuition for this probably leans on analogies like the market for CPU innovation heating up again now that Apple has got away from relying on Intel and is producing their own CPUs. People would intuit that if display manufacturers could “get away from eInk” and “produce their own electrophoretic panels”, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” market would “heat up.”

> The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself

They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business.

> so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.”

I don't understand why someone would believe that, especially people who aren't involved in the industry. As I mentioned, it would be the equivalent of me believing that Google was strangling the market of innovation in search engines and that Microsoft is strangling the market for innovation in operating systems. Although now that I think deeper about the line about Microsoft, maybe Microsoft is doing that? Is that why desktop Linux has not progressed at all and remains unusable?

> People would intuit that if display manufacturers could “get away from eInk” and “produce their own electrophoretic panels”, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” market would “heat up.”

Eink is considered a niche player in my industry. It would be the equivalent of perhaps a ultralowpower CPU manufacturer in the CPU industry. In my opinion, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” is not going to happen using electrophoretics because the physics of the problem is too challenging. In my opinion, the main reason why nothing is really happening there is because doing fundamental research on display technologies is expensive. Bezos spent hundreds of millions on Liquavista before he killed it, I'm pretty sure Qualcomm spent a lot on Mirasol. The problem is VCs don't want to invest in hard problems. They can get a quicker return from yet another internet service, AI/ML, another airbnb, another uber, another payment gateway and so on.

> They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business.

They do seem to hold rather a lot of patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation), though I don't have the domain knowledge to know whether any of these are "unavoidable" in the domain in the way that e.g. software engineering process patents tend to be.

Perhaps their competitors actually license some of them? Or are in a patent pooling arrangement?

> It would be the equivalent of me believing that Google was strangling the market of innovation in search engines

I mean, with the PageRank patent, they... sort of were?

Nobody could come up with anything nearly as optimal as Google's approach for a long time, let alone more optimal; the next-best algorithms were way less good. And so we didn't see any real Google Search competitors — competitors competing on index quality against Google — after Google came into the market. (There's still nobody with a better raw index than Google's, AFAIK.)

The original PageRank patent expired in 2015. A lot of advancement in the search space happened in 2015! Bing got a lot better, for one. Guess why? :)

(Of course, companies that were somewhat immune to America's WIPO power — e.g. the government-backed conglomerates of China/Russia — have just been using PageRank or algorithms analogous to it in their web search services since the beginning. It was only the, er, NATO-member-country web-search-engine market that effectively stalled out.)

> They do seem to hold rather a lot of patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation), though I don't have the domain knowledge to know whether any of these are "unavoidable" in the domain in the way that e.g. software engineering process patents tend to be.

Some of those patents like the one about dual substrate TFT seem vaguely broad to me, but it doesn't even seem to be a display technology related patent to me. In fact it seems to be about microfluidics which is an abandoned area of research in display technology, at least in the commercial sense. As for "a lot of patents", just how many patents would you expect a company to have? How long has eInk been in business? 20 years? 30 years? I think I first heard of them in 2000s so at least 20 years it seems like.

More importantly, why would we assume anything perverse is happening? My point is that HN commenters seemed to have a strong foundational belief (as shown by the original comment I responded to) that something perverse was happening. OP was effectively claiming that eInk would try to stop this electrochromic nanostructure display tech from succeeding, and now that I've challenged that claim, I don't see any OP or anyone else provide any sort of factual basis for it. So if you'll allow me, doesn't it kind of sound like a bunch of software guys shitting on a niche display company that failed to achieve their lofty desires?

As a display guy, can I just say I have perhaps analogous despair at how terrible the software for everything I do on a daily basis is. I'm forced to reboot my desktop pretty much on a monthly basis. PLC controls that suck. Interfaces that are so horrible. Is that all Google's fault? Microsoft's fault? Is it all due to patent trolls? Who do I get to blame? You guys tell me please.

Google and Microsoft are used by billions, why not eInk, is the question we're asking.

> Google and Microsoft are used by billions, why not eInk, is the question we're asking.

I don't understand the comparison between a search engine, an OS , and a niche low power display component. I had brought up Google and Microsoft as examples to prove that holding many many patents is not an unusual thing for companies to do. Also, who is "we"? The context I was originally responding to was the insinuation that eInk or its partners or some unknown consortium of patent poolers (alleged above) was an evil patent troll that was blocking progress in the display industry and was going to prevent this electrochromic nanostructure display from being successful.

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