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Comment by manxman | Hacker News Reader

Their product page is pretty much what’s on the market at present https://www.eink.com/

Because they are massive parent trolls who sue and prevent competition. They need to be called out whenever the technology is mentioned.

Thank goodness you’re here to do that!

Every eink thread states this without any specifics.

Calling them patent trolls seems especially weird since since the Eink company actually produces a lot of stuff.

While "patent troll" might be inaccurate they pretty much stifled the technology development for a decade

Calling companies that hold a patent you find valuable and aren't distributing it's use how you personally see fit a "patent troll" isn't just inaccurate, it's an intentional mischaracterization for the purpose of eliciting a negative emotional response solely to spread your narrative. It cheapens the meaning and lowers any engagement to fight for the same cause when you realize it's a facade driven entirely by sour grapes and a lack of understanding of the patent system being criticized.

I guess it's okay here though, because [passionate story about side project idea using eink that could be tinkered on but never actually idealized into something].

That is essentially the entire idea behind patents. They get a limited time of control, the public benefits later. Like it or not, this is how the system is supposed to work.

That's the problem. It is not working. It's great for big companies to stop their competitors, but not for actual innovation.

"I don't like how the system works" and "I blame this company for working in the system" aren't really the same point though.

If the real problem is the first one, then implicitly there is a need to propose something that works better. And that is no obvious (but it's obviously not simple).

That's bullshit though. People always make this claim but never with evidence or a source, or they provide a source that has either been retracted or simply states the same claim without evidence or citation.

There's good reason to believe that the technology is simply expensive and hard to manufacture, not that there's some giant conspiracy of patent trolls. And the use of "troll" here, when there's actually a product that's being made, is inaccurate. "Trolls" are companies that buy up dubious patents, don't actually make or invent anything, and sue everyone and hope that they settle instead of challenging the patent in court.

Every new generation of LCD and OLED has plenty of patents, and there are affordable products eventually. OLED in particular started out very expensive and now is everywhere.

E-Ink is just tough.

They seem to be pretty much the opposite of a patent troll, no? I mean, you and I may not like how aggressively they are approaching it, but they did develop the technology.

Overall you can argue they as a company would have done better to allow the tech to broaden and reap licensing fees, but you can't argue that it isn't their decision to make. Or, you can, but you aren't arguing against these guys but the system of IP laws in general.

The original patents expired years ago (2016/2017?) and even before them EInk had some legal setbacks (Trekstor/OED). I remember buying a Plastic Logic device that used a different tech w/ similar output (OTFT substrate), and we've seen waves of technologies/companies come and go (Liquivista, Clearink, Mirasol, QR-LPD, DES, RLCD, etc.) so there isn't any shortage of competing technologies, it just turns out development/productization of new display technologies is massively expensive (EInk worked w/ Philips to get started and had to spend hundreds of millions ramping up production) and pretty thankless - Mary Lou Jepson had some interesting public discussions on the economics of new display tech when launching/running Pixel Qi.

I've heard that Eink is notoriously hard to work with and as an outsider looking in, their product development is frustratingly slow, but it's a public company (acquired by a Taiwanese company a long while back), and looking at their financials over recent years, their operating margins seem to be 10-15%, which I guess beats a lot of other display companies, but still doesn't seem so impressive vs other semi/tech companies. That no one's disrupted them over the past few decades I think speaks to how it's more than just an IP moat at play.

> I've heard that Eink is notoriously hard to work with

From whom? I asked someone who commented this on HN and the person replied saying that they had refused to help him debug his 3 display project. So yes, any display company is notoriously hard to work with if you're not buying a reasonable quantity of their product. It is like saying Samsung Displays is notoriously hard to work with as they're not helping my startup debug our problems where we've bought a grand total of 3 displays this year.

> Because they are massive parent trolls who sue and prevent competition. They need to be called out whenever the technology is mentioned.

Where? How? Please share some evidence so that your claims can be verified.

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