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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Question for you. I always saw the problem as: only one company or limited companies can manufacture them. Those companies are having issues manufacturing them so the price is high. But if more companies were allowed to manufacture them, wouldn’t we see more people solving production problems and lowering prices? If there is one company with low yields and high prices, if everyone is allowed to make them then there is a monetary gain for new entrants willing to solve yield problems. But if things are heavily patent encumbered then the whole world is at the whim of one organization to succeed or fail - there is no competition.

That is to say, it’s not that they’re charging high prices out of greed, but that there’s no competition forcing prices down.

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Not OP but what you’re saying is absolutely true.

But first someone has to invent it. Nobody’s gonna spend a few thousand or million dollars to invent something unless they get their money and more back, so that’s the point of patents.

And if they patent something and don’t capitalize on it enough, that’s their loss, because they had to detail their invention in their patent application and that’s public information. Patents last only 20 years and for most industries, that’s not very long.

(That said, I think software patents are a different beast. Because 20 years in software engineering is like 100 years in civil engineering, for example, since software engineering is like a few thousand years younger discipline than civil.)

Actually I think patents do far more harm than good in our economy. In aggregate they slow down innovation significantly by carving a huge moat around every new advancement. Without patents, there’s still loads of natural incentives to innovate. The difference is that instead of fewer larger leaps, there would be many more smaller leaps. You can always make money if you develop a new technology in secret and then start selling it before your competitors have any chance of going in to production. And then there’s always reason to support public investment in research. But patents take new innovations and then legally prevent the hundreds of potential innovators who would have built on that idea and improved it from going anywhere near it. Most innovation is incremental and with patents, that innovation is blocked from the market. This is a huge loss for our economy. The only singular function of a patent is to prevent innovation. (Legally, that is all they do.) The idea that the follow on effect of this restriction is a net gain in innovation is always taken on faith. It’s a story told over and over again. But when you look at things like open source, you can see how many of the arguments for patents simply aren’t true.

>Actually I think patents do far more harm than good in our economy.

How so? Nobody would bother investing in R&D if after all their labor and toil, someone else would be legally allowed to copy it for free and get all the profits without having had any of the expenses and risk that come with hardware R&D.

The (US)patent system has its flaws, but without one it would be even worse.

> Nobody would bother investing in R&D if after all their labor and toil, someone else would be legally allowed to copy it for free and get all the profits without having had any of the expenses and risk that come with hardware R&D.

People say this all the time without presenting any evidence, as if it is common sense. I don’t actually think this is correct! Of course the character of investment would change. Instead of a small number of large investments, we would see a large number of smaller investments. If your competition is churning out some widget and you can make a $10,000 investment in your factory to lower your production costs below theirs and out compete them, you will make that investment.

My point is that I believe in this case, natural market mechanisms are adequate to stimulate investment. Meanwhile proponents of patents must justify the enormous cost to society caused by heavily restricting innovation with legal penalties, building a 20 year moat around every new invention. That massively hampers incremental process, and raises the cost required for investments to succeed. Without patents, smaller incremental investments will pay off, but there will be much more competition. Unless you think markets cannot function without the massive government intervention which is intellectual property restrictions.

And heck don’t take my word for it. The folks at the free market Mises Institute hate IP restrictions:

https://youtu.be/cWShFz4d2RY?si=z9EmhyFFyUl_-vu4

There will always be investment.

But it’s not black and white. Some people will do things for $10, others $20, others $50. We all have a different price.

With patents, it’s basically offering $50 so you get the most people doing it as possible.

If we did away with patents, it would be like offering $20. Sure, R&D will still happen… just less.

It's not just doing one thing.

Innovators who succeed at getting a patent might get more money for their innovation. But now only one person or org can legally make incremental improvements to those ideas. Without patents, the value per innovation might be lower to an individual innovator, but there are more innovations to be made because everything is on the table.

You are not just saying "you get $50 for this innovation" you are additionally saying "this innovation is now off limits for 20 years", and there may be hundreds of potential innovators who would have invested in improvements which have been legally barred from doing so.

My classic example is the 3D printer. They were $50,000 when first sold under patent, then 13 years later they were $25,000 still under patent. Then the patents expired and within 3 years they were under $2000. Ten years after patent expiration they were $250. So the price dropped only 50% in 13 years under patent. Then with no patent it dropped 90% in three years. In ten years it dropped 99%. It takes a lot of innovation to make a $25,000 3D printer work for just $250, and absolutely none of that innovation happened with the benefit of patents. Innovation will always happen! We do not need massive government intervention to make it happen.

Personally I think the innovation required to refine something pales in comparison to first inventing something new. It’s just so less risky and so less expensive. You start with something that already know works and that’s huge.

If you’ve ever tried to DIY something, it’s so so much harder if you can’t find someone who has done it already.

So to me, the people who may have made 3D printing cheaper aren’t exactly in the same class of innovation and risk.

>My classic example is the 3D printer.

It may be your favorite example but in this case it's a very poor one. You keep harping it as if it proves the point that patents are always the biggest problem holding all tech back, but in this case you're comparing apples to pickup trucks and omitting the forest from the montains.

The price of 3D printers dropped because the demand for 3D printers is huuuuge and they're also very easy to manufacture meaning in that case it actually was the patens holding the technology back and not the manufacturing challenges, but E-ink film is both tricky to manufacture and the demand for this kind of limited technology is very niche beyond e-readers and price tags meaning there's no economies of scale.

I built a 3d printer with a work colleague over 10 years ago in his garage using aluminum rails, stepper motors and an Arduino. I can't build E-ink film in a garage.

With your example you'd also think that the reason we don't have mass adoption of 3nm chips everywhere must be because of TSMC's patents and not because that sort of tech is tricky to master at scale.

Your 3d printer example just does not work in this case so please be so king as to reflect on the matter and update your viewpoint accordingly.

Interesting point. But I can be sure that your idea has big chance to be uncorrect. Because we already have a country without patent esp for software: China. Do you know any invention or great product from China?

> I always saw the problem as: only one company or limited companies can manufacture them.

That is a really odd assumption. There are multiple companies making electrophoretic displays and multiple different technologies, of which only one is really commercially effective so far in a very limited niche space. Why don't you think physics is the limitation? I mean, don't you think above would be the equivalent of me saying that the reason we don't have daily flights to Mars is because SpaceX is the only manufacturer of Falcon Heavy.

Probably the parent simply doesn't have a solid grasp of physics, hence is unable to think of that limitation.

A surprisingly large fraction of seemingly intelligent, educated, and otherwise decent folks have no clue beyond a superficial understanding. Even though superficial appearances may suggest that they would be smart enough to figure out what they do and do not know.

> if everyone is allowed to make them then there is a monetary gain for new entrants willing to solve yield problems [...] That is to say, it’s not that they’re charging high prices out of greed, but that there’s no competition forcing prices down.

What makes you think there would be so much competition on driving down prices of large 1Hz B/W displays that can't display motion videos properly and suffer from terrible ghosting, if patents weren't a thing? Do you think there's large display-tech manufacturers knocking on e-inks door wishing to enter the market for such niche displays and e-ink just keeps saying 'NO'?

If that were such a lucrative untapped market then someone like Samsung or LG would have swallowed up e-ink holdings already or drowned them in lawsuits to squeeze a cross lichenizing deal out of them, but it's not.

Here's the hard to swallow pill: The consumer market for large e-ink displays is incredibly niche that it's not worth entering by second players, and better just leaving one incumbent player deal with their niche little sand-pit.

You're looking for problems that aren't there while also grossly over-estimating the size of this super-niche market.

It's a nothing-burger that, due to lack of knowledge and understanding of the market and technology, HN loves to spin into an emotionally charged straw-man every few months outraged they can't buy TV sized e-ink displays at Wallmart for $199, without even considering the technical challenges, product feasibility, economies of scale and market situation of such a fantasy product, thinking e-ink must be evil or stupid for such a product not already existing.

The truth is, there is no conspiracy and the e-ink market has already self-regulated itself: The mass market e-ink displays like for price tags and e-readers have already gotten cheap enough, while big e-ink displays are very expensive because there's next to no market for them to warrant further optimizations of economies of scale or interest from other players to even bother competing regardless of patents.

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