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.