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E Ink is a great example of how the patent system stifles innovation. One company developed a small, expensive, newspaper-quality electrophoretic display with

• 0x00000000 6y ago
  Their sales/marketing philosophy was disappointing too. Zero interest in supporting the hobbyist community.
• deadbunny 6y ago
  Exactly the same thing happened in the 3D printing space.
  • HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by that, there are new & improved models of 3d printers coming out all the time and decent hobbyist printers are becoming available for progressively lower prices.
    • balfirevic 6y ago
      Yes, that started to happen once the key patents expired.
    • jcfrei 6y ago
      Parent is probably talking about SLS (selective laser sintering). Patents expired in 2014.
    • jjeaff 6y ago
      I believe the major fdm patents were filed decades ago and little was done until recently when they expired.
• nine_k 6y ago
  Again I remind about the idea of exponential patents: the holder has to pay every year twice as much as last year. If the patent is protecting some business's hockey-stick growth, it's worth the fee, so it fulfills the original purpose of patents, that is, avoiding trade secrets while protecting cash-cow inventions for a limited time. But sitting on a patent becomes prohibitively expensive soon enough even for a large company.
  • amelius 6y ago
    I think the major flaw in patents is that they provide a monopoly on the technology (for a limited time). Monopolies are bad. Let the USPTO determine a fair price for a technology. That way the company can decide if they keep the technology secret, and the USPTO can decide if they think the technology is too important for society and it needs to be open (and thus increase the price). Other companies can then get a license on the technology for that price. And no companies can be denied access to a technology (like the current situation).
    • WalterBright 6y ago
      Nobody, and certainly not the USPTO, is able to determine the future value of any patent.
      • amelius 6y ago
        Nobody can predict the future value of pretty much anything, yet trading happens all the time. To improve the predictive capability of the USPTO, they could host a bidding process in which other companies can participate.
        • finnh 6y ago
          That's kind of what the private market already does, without the PTO's involvement. If people think your patent has value, they can license or or buy rights to it.
• jamesbyrdjr 6y ago
  > E Ink is a great example of how the patent system stifles innovation. I don't see how this is an obvious fact. I don't even see how this is a valid example. > every comment in this thread is looking forward to finally seeing some innovation in this space "once the patents expire It is telling, very telling that when asked, none of those comments are even able to describe which patent it is that is blocking "innovation in this space". Here's the facts. The physics of bistable displays is complex. Many have tried with very different technologies. Electrowetting. Interferometric. Other types of electrophoretic. Electrochemical. The investors in all of these realized it was too expensive to get it to the finish line. Even Amazon decided to trash Liquavista. The truth is that investors would rather invest in some new consumer internet service, or AI/ML, which is a simpler problem that will give a quicker return on their money rather than try to create a bistable display solution. If you go to SID, you'll see that there's tonnes of startups that try to solve the "fast" or "color" bistable display chalenge, and they all fail due to fundamental physics problems and burn out their funding. That's also probably why E Ink isn't able to get past their limitations. I genuinely hope this helps people understand that this is not "patent system stifles innovation".
  • jandrese 6y ago
    There is no point in even trying to improve the technology right now because the patent holder would just take it anyway.
    • kmeisthax 6y ago
      If you had constructed a new technology that is an improvement of a patented technology, the original owner doesn't gain ownership over your improvement. They only have the right to prohibit use of the original technology. If you patent the improvement, then anyone who wants to use it would have to license both your patent and the base patent's inventions. There isn't a concept of "derivative works" (like in copyright law) where if you didn't license the base patent, you lose ownership over the improvement. If you had failed to patent the improvement, then yes, the patent holder could conceivably use your improvement without paying you, but that's a different scenario. In very large and complicated fields, you'll often have a minefield of conflicting patent claims, much of which are minor improvement patents. These often coalesce into patent pools, assuming all participants in the pool are interested in playing ball. (Looking at you, H.265.) You don't see certain players looking to invalidate patents on the basis of not having been paid for the right to improve their invention, because such a right doesn't really exist.
• deleted 6y ago
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• olliej 6y ago
  The idea is that they encourage people to come up with a better way to do the same thing. The problem is patents have come closer to patenting the overarching concept rather than an implementation. A patent application should be required to come with [an] implementation[s] to show that every claim being made exists and has actually been developed.
• Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  Completely Agree. Affordable E-Ink large external displays[1] have become like fusion energy. That said, I wonder why there hasn't been a competing tech e.g. like LED vs LCD; Are the fundamental physics behind E-Ink so perfect for the low-power display that no other alternative is possible (or) is it just the absurd patent which stifles even exploring this direction. [1]https://needgap.com/problems/43-affordable-e-ink-large-external-displays-eink-displays https://needgap.com/problems/43-affordable-e-ink-large-exter... (Disclaimer: It's a problem validation platform, I created).
  • academi 6y ago
    > become like fusion energy This fusion reactor could be affordable. It just needs to be invented first: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190295733A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190295733A1/en
    • Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
      I didn't question it's affordability, just that it's always 30 years away! https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6464477 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6464477
      • Dylan16807 6y ago
        30 years away if properly funded. It has never been properly funded.
  • TooSmugToFail 6y ago
    Just checked out Needgap, awesome work!
    • Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
      Thank you for checking it out!
• flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago
  >We could have had large form, glossy brochure quality displays with video refresh rates by now, but nobody outside of China wanted to get anywhere near this patent minefield. That is quite the leap. Some inventions we know and love would have never seen the light of day if the patent protection window was lesser.
• unityByFreedom 6y ago
  > the patent system stifles innovation. Patents protect inventors and encourage innovation. There's no better way to encourage invention than to protect those who came up with the idea. I don't like it when they're applied to software but that's another story.
  • RHSeeger 6y ago
    Patents both encourage and discourage innovation. - If I invent something and patent it, I can assure that I am the only one that can benefit from it for a period of time; to recoup the costs involved. - If I invent something based on someone else's patent, they can deny me the right to use their patent if they think it would negatively impact them (for example, if my version is better and nobody would buy their version once mine was available). In many cases, it's just not worth bothering to even try innovating in an area because of this (and similar reasons). Patents have both good and bad points. Presenting just the good or just the bad, and pretending it's the only valid view, is disingenuous at best.
  • hakfoo 6y ago
    Patents support a fairly narrow model of what innovation is "supposed to be"-- the one man in a garage who can scale his product from zero to infinity with little to no outside support. The thing is, for a lot of industries, that's a dated pipedream. It's not 1804 and you're not Richard Trevithick. You're not going to challenge TSMC with a semiconductor fab built in the backyard shed. Even if you had huge amounts of startup capital and a laser-focused market vision, there's also a lot of innovation that's time-sensitive: for example, if you're building a better petrol engine or coal-burning generator, will you be able to scale before the product is obsolete? Beyond that, I suspect there are also a fair number of patent holders who just take potshots at the market-- wildly mis-guessing their target market or (attempting to get orders or raise funds) based on promising undeliverables, because they don't have the full knowledge of getting a product to market. After their business fails, they'll just spend the rest of the patent term as legal unexploded ordnance-- useless by themselves but waiting to blow the leg off of some poor sod who happened to step in the wrong place. Reducing the term from 20 years to 10 or even 5 would tend to prioritize partnership development rather than the "one man in a garage" mentality: with the clock ticking that fast, your best chance is to license broadly, hoping that someone will get product to market before the patent expires.
• tsujp 6y ago
  > ... the patent system stifles innovation. This is not broad-strokes true. Within the realm of tech? Maybe. Within the realm of XYZ? Maybe. Innovation requires investment and time. The classic example for the positive merits of the patent system is the pharmaceutical industry. No pharma company is going to spend 5 - 20 years and millions or billions developing new medicine if someone can immediately copy it and make a generic brand pricing it cheaper (they don't need to make back those costs). The issue of drugs costing an arm and a leg here is not really relevant either as that's moreso an American phenomenon, here in Australia or the UK they are reasonably priced. Anyway the point here is that the patent system's happy-path design is to give the inventor of X time to make their money back and some profit before competition drives the price down. Is that abused? Absolutely whole-heartedly yes. Is the solution to the abuse the absolute removal of the patent system? Absolutely not.
  • quercetumMons 6y ago
    >This is not broad-strokes true. It absolutely is, though. Innovation is inherently hampered when someone owns the right to the use of a technology.
    • pzone 6y ago
      Innovation is also hampered when inventors are not sufficiently compensated for the broad social value they create with a new invention. When anyone is allowed to copy a new invention instantly, there is not enough incentive to innovate. A good patent system must strike a balance between these two forces.
      • quercetumMons 6y ago
        >inventors are not sufficiently compensated Patents do little to nothing in this regard.
        • tsujp 6y ago
          Incorrect. Patents quite literally to provide the developer of a new technology a legal monopoly for some time so they can (maybe) recoup their costs as an incentivisation mechanism to encourage innovation.
• userbinator 6y ago
  We could have had large form, glossy brochure quality displays with video refresh rates by now ...or more than 16 levels (4-bit) of grayscale, something that a hobbyist has already shown is possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284 We could also have mass-produced electrophoretic sheet (basically the display without the electrodes), that you can "draw" on with any suitable voltage source; you can see someone playing with one in this video and showing how the technology works (and is fundamentally quite simple): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXxSOR1PHpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXxSOR1PHpE ...and someone else, coincidentally also Russian, making his own eink display(!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGVZCEuoccE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGVZCEuoccE
  • andrehill 6y ago
    > We could have had large form, glossy brochure quality displays with video refresh rates by now Based on what principle? It strikes me as most of the comments here lack a basic understanding of the physics behind electrophoresis. It is an inherently slow process. > ...or more than 16 levels (4-bit) of grayscale, something that a hobbyist has already shown is possible: a simple google search showed me that you're quite badly mistaken. 5-bit grayscale or 32 levels is widely used. Just google nxp 6sololite 5-bit eink and you'll find "Up to 5-bit pixel grayscale representation" and has been for 5 or 6 years.
• tomcam 6y ago
  The flip side of your observation: Every device your comment is being read on represents at least hundreds of patents, profits from which sped up the development of microcomputers from none when I was born to hilariously inexpensive now.
• girvo 6y ago
  You’re right. I absolutely adore my Onyx Boox Note2 — it’s e-ink display is just brilliant, but it also proves your point: they’re a Chinese company through and through, building amazing tools and gadgets because patents don’t scare them off. Also, the fact they ported basically every software feature from the Note3 which came out weeks after I got my Note2 made me amazingly happy, their after sales support has been surprisingly good, the new firmware has removed literally all latency when using the Wacom stylus for note taking, and I recently bought the Staedtler “pencil” Wacom compatible stylus and now I’ve literally ditched pen and paper for good. It’s that excellent, for me.
• titchard 6y ago
  This is what frustrates me - I would love eInk panels, or a reader in a larger format than your standard kindle and kobo affair so I could read textbooks properly. An A4 or slightly larger eReader should have existed (and not cost ridiculous money) years ago.
  • SZJX 6y ago
    Hmm, it does exist though in the form of Sony Digital Paper, the first version of which was released a few years ago. I have one and it works quite well for me.
    • titchard 6y ago
      Agreed, it does exist - but that model you speak of is £849 for me - that is not an accessible price. An iPad pro that is the same size is only £100 more for me, but then thats not what I am after. As ePaper and eInk has been around for a while now, I would expect that much like TVs the price per inch drops over time but it seems fixed at that 7" mark then the price rockets. I get that a larger format eReader is a smaller market than the standard book, but I don't get how I can get 10 kindles (or similar) for the same price as that Sony one just because of size. If someone can enlighten me why I'd be grateful, if after a certain point the screens get harder to manufacture maybe?
• isamuel 6y ago
  Any firm with a truly valuable product could buy the patent (or at minimum, a license). This is basically Coase Theorem 101. At this scale, transaction costs are not significant and so the property right will end up allocated to the most efficient holder. Even if you don’t like that pure theory point, litigation is expensive and takes a long time. If some small little patent holder is really being stubborn and you’ve got something valuable, it’s not that hard to grind them into dust while you get big. Litigation financing makes this a little harder than it used to be but still.
  • marcosscriven 6y ago
    And yet the reality does not reflect the theory.
    • wildfire 6y ago
      In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.