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I've heard people argue that e-ink displays would be in much wider use if the patent-holding company weren't so protective of the technology. So the news I'm w

I've heard people argue that e-ink displays would be in much wider use if the patent-holding company weren't so protective of the technology. So the news I'm waiting to hear is when E-Ink the company decides to loosen up its business practices.

listerOfSmeg 6y ago
not going to happen it s the only thing they have and they know its a cash cow if it gets wide adoption unfortunately they have gotten greedy and no one will pay it. They also seem to think their market is digital signage and aren't that interested in licensing for other mass market consumer products despite the fact the market it has been adopted most in is e-readers
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  This is why I am so against intellectual monopoly like this. It does not create continuous incentive to innovate and instead allows companies with just a bit of innovation to rest on their laurels. I think there would be much more innovation in the world, aka a “higher rate of innovation” without intellectual monopolies and intellectual property restrictions.
  - est31 6y ago
    Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything? This current situation is unfortunate, but I think it's an imperfection of the market. If the patent owning company had been a bit less greedy, they could have made far more money with it.
    - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
      > Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything? Because they can't begin to copy you until you've released your product to market, so you have profit potential for being the first mover. This happens all the time as only a small percentage of the innovation that occurs actually gets patented. In some cases it would be possible for a big company to take your innovation out from under you but if they can do a better job then we're all better off for that. If as an inventor you've only got one idea, you're screwed. You need to be able to innovate repeatedly. But the concise way of responding to this is: markets already reward innovation. We do not need state controls on information to "stimulate innovation". The incentive exists as a natural effect of markets.
      - est31 6y ago
        Sure there is a tiny reward in that you offer something earlier than your competitors, but it might not be enough to offset the investments into the research that made it possible in the first place. Yes, a lot of innovation is not patented, but that's usually the stuff that requires little investments. Also don't forget the disclosure part of patents. If you want something be protected by patents, you need to publish a description of how you do it. You can't just keep the engineers isolated on an island or whatever. A no patent world would make manufacturers build in even more measures to prevent reverse engineering, engineers sharing secrets, etc.
        TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        First, I would think that research would be more distributed - more smaller investments rather than centralized large developments. Second, I am not just advocating for abolishing intellectual property restrictions but also for promoting a culture of sharing. If we actually care about advancing human society, we should be willing to look at how to truly maximize innovation. It seems to be quite plausible that if we abandon IP restrictions as a notion and embrace sharing while also permitting reverse engineering of those who don't share, we would see a much higher rate of innovation. That has HUGE implications for society and I can't accept the idea that patents are good simply because most people believe it.
      - z3t4 6y ago
        There are so many people out there with crazy ideas, but they don't want to invest in it because they know they will be eaten by a bigger fish. Their only hope is to stay under the radar long enough so that they will have enough money to retire once their idea gets copied.
        TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        There are also a lot of people who would really like to improve upon existing products but are prevented from doing so due to patents. So patents promote some kinds of innovation while severely restricting other kinds. It may well be true that there is more potential innovation being blocked due to IP restrictions than there is being promoted by IP rights. People seem to take it as a given that the latter outweighs the former, but rarely have I encountered evidence for this claim. The implications of getting this wrong are staggering, and I worry that people rarely critique this idea.
    - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
      For the same reason startups can win over existing giants: first to market is important.
    - RobertoG 6y ago
      How E ink innovations come to happen? I think it was developed by MIT and not by E INK, is that right?
      - hobofan 6y ago
        It was developed _by_ professors and students _at_ MIT, who then went on to found the E Ink Corporation (and presumably found an arrangement regarding the IP with MIT). This is the backstory of basically every startup founded out of a university lab.
    - deeviant 6y ago
      The whole "innovate" word is just loaded and overblown. Many software patents written today cover average work done by average engineers to solve average problems in a way that if you asked 100 engineers to solve said problem, the majority of them would could up with exactly the method in the patent. Software patents are just a truncheon for incumbent companies to wield against other companies unlucky enough to try to enter the same space as patent-holding incumbent.
      - est31 6y ago
        I agree with you about the software patents. They should go in the places they still exist. My statement was mainly meant about non-software patents. Sometimes a lot of research/experimentation/thought goes into a single patentable invention.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- seszett 6y ago
  Is it true that e-readers is the largest market for e-ink? Supermarkets alone use each thousands of e-ink displays for shelf price labels for example, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a more profitable market than e-readers for e-ink, and also much easier to cater to.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  This seems to be the opposite of what the article says: >This technology is not going to be employed for digital signage, but instead will be marketed towards e-reader companies who want a high resolution alternative to E INK Kaleido 2.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  > They also seem to think their market is digital signage I believe this was because of the limitations of the previous generations. I saw some color e-paper that was super slow to refresh and had terrible ghosting. No one would buy a color e-reader if it takes 15 seconds to turn a page, especially if it costs more than grayscale ereaders due to the 'new technology'. OTOH, store signage is a use case where refresh and ghosting is relatively unimportant.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Pre-Pandemic I started seeing them in the re-branded Amazon/Whole Foods Market in Santa Monica. They replaced all the traditional paper price tags with tiny e-ink displays. I assume that this was to reduce the amount of labor necessary to handle price changes and sales.
  - faceplanted 6y ago
    reduce labour but also reduce printing and paper use, yes.
ianai 6y ago
Too bad one of the megacaps hasn’t bought them out.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  Yes because the only thing better than a medium sized company that won’t license its patents is a megacorp that won’t license its patents /s No the solution is to incentivize patent licensing and in the case of software make it simply not patentable. The corporate overlords won’t save us from themselves. If they had their way patents would simply never expire.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    A megacorp sitting on some patents can and will still release a whole range of mass market products (large volumes, so has to be cheap) that uses those patents and makes it available to the masses. A medium sized company can't really do that, so at best they will release a niche product that makes it available to a few people.
    - syshum 6y ago
      MegaCorp (like say Amazon) would lock the tech up so only their products have it, So instead of being able to pick from a Kindle PaperWhite, OnyxBook, and a Remarkable you would only have the Kindle... and varitions of the Kindle Medium Corp will license their patent (at extreme rates) to other companies MegaCorp will not. Medium Corp is better than MegaCorp for consumers most of the time. FRAND licensing even batter, and No Patents at all even better
  - unethical_ban 6y ago
    Your first sentence, but unironically. Big corp probably isn't as devoted to milking one IP asset to the detriment of its adoption. And they may have the resources to make more products in-house that utilize the tech. I agree that the patent system needs modification in the long run, though.
    - 6y ago
spoonjim 6y ago
If the patent holding company hadn’t bothered, e-ink would barely exist though.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- notRobot 6y ago
  If they'd been less strict with their patents then lots of other companies would've been able to innovate in the space. See comments about 3D printer from above in the thread: > Don’t forget 3D printing that also only really started when patents expired. > Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing.

listerOfSmeg 6y ago

not going to happen it s the only thing they have and they know its a cash cow if it gets wide adoption unfortunately they have gotten greedy and no one will pay it. They also seem to think their market is digital signage and aren't that interested in licensing for other mass market consumer products despite the fact the market it has been adopted most in is e-readers

TaylorAlexander 6y ago
This is why I am so against intellectual monopoly like this. It does not create continuous incentive to innovate and instead allows companies with just a bit of innovation to rest on their laurels. I think there would be much more innovation in the world, aka a “higher rate of innovation” without intellectual monopolies and intellectual property restrictions.
- est31 6y ago
  Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything? This current situation is unfortunate, but I think it's an imperfection of the market. If the patent owning company had been a bit less greedy, they could have made far more money with it.
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    > Why would you want to innovate when the bigger competitor can just copy you without paying you anything? Because they can't begin to copy you until you've released your product to market, so you have profit potential for being the first mover. This happens all the time as only a small percentage of the innovation that occurs actually gets patented. In some cases it would be possible for a big company to take your innovation out from under you but if they can do a better job then we're all better off for that. If as an inventor you've only got one idea, you're screwed. You need to be able to innovate repeatedly. But the concise way of responding to this is: markets already reward innovation. We do not need state controls on information to "stimulate innovation". The incentive exists as a natural effect of markets.
    - est31 6y ago
      Sure there is a tiny reward in that you offer something earlier than your competitors, but it might not be enough to offset the investments into the research that made it possible in the first place. Yes, a lot of innovation is not patented, but that's usually the stuff that requires little investments. Also don't forget the disclosure part of patents. If you want something be protected by patents, you need to publish a description of how you do it. You can't just keep the engineers isolated on an island or whatever. A no patent world would make manufacturers build in even more measures to prevent reverse engineering, engineers sharing secrets, etc.
      - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        First, I would think that research would be more distributed - more smaller investments rather than centralized large developments. Second, I am not just advocating for abolishing intellectual property restrictions but also for promoting a culture of sharing. If we actually care about advancing human society, we should be willing to look at how to truly maximize innovation. It seems to be quite plausible that if we abandon IP restrictions as a notion and embrace sharing while also permitting reverse engineering of those who don't share, we would see a much higher rate of innovation. That has HUGE implications for society and I can't accept the idea that patents are good simply because most people believe it.
    - z3t4 6y ago
      There are so many people out there with crazy ideas, but they don't want to invest in it because they know they will be eaten by a bigger fish. Their only hope is to stay under the radar long enough so that they will have enough money to retire once their idea gets copied.
      - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        There are also a lot of people who would really like to improve upon existing products but are prevented from doing so due to patents. So patents promote some kinds of innovation while severely restricting other kinds. It may well be true that there is more potential innovation being blocked due to IP restrictions than there is being promoted by IP rights. People seem to take it as a given that the latter outweighs the former, but rarely have I encountered evidence for this claim. The implications of getting this wrong are staggering, and I worry that people rarely critique this idea.
  - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    For the same reason startups can win over existing giants: first to market is important.
  - RobertoG 6y ago
    How E ink innovations come to happen? I think it was developed by MIT and not by E INK, is that right?
    - hobofan 6y ago
      It was developed _by_ professors and students _at_ MIT, who then went on to found the E Ink Corporation (and presumably found an arrangement regarding the IP with MIT). This is the backstory of basically every startup founded out of a university lab.
  - deeviant 6y ago
    The whole "innovate" word is just loaded and overblown. Many software patents written today cover average work done by average engineers to solve average problems in a way that if you asked 100 engineers to solve said problem, the majority of them would could up with exactly the method in the patent. Software patents are just a truncheon for incumbent companies to wield against other companies unlucky enough to try to enter the same space as patent-holding incumbent.
    - est31 6y ago
      I agree with you about the software patents. They should go in the places they still exist. My statement was mainly meant about non-software patents. Sometimes a lot of research/experimentation/thought goes into a single patentable invention.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
seszett 6y ago
Is it true that e-readers is the largest market for e-ink? Supermarkets alone use each thousands of e-ink displays for shelf price labels for example, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a more profitable market than e-readers for e-ink, and also much easier to cater to.
Daho0n 6y ago
This seems to be the opposite of what the article says: >This technology is not going to be employed for digital signage, but instead will be marketed towards e-reader companies who want a high resolution alternative to E INK Kaleido 2.
gnicholas 6y ago
> They also seem to think their market is digital signage I believe this was because of the limitations of the previous generations. I saw some color e-paper that was super slow to refresh and had terrible ghosting. No one would buy a color e-reader if it takes 15 seconds to turn a page, especially if it costs more than grayscale ereaders due to the 'new technology'. OTOH, store signage is a use case where refresh and ghosting is relatively unimportant.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Pre-Pandemic I started seeing them in the re-branded Amazon/Whole Foods Market in Santa Monica. They replaced all the traditional paper price tags with tiny e-ink displays. I assume that this was to reduce the amount of labor necessary to handle price changes and sales.
- faceplanted 6y ago
  reduce labour but also reduce printing and paper use, yes.

ianai 6y ago

Too bad one of the megacaps hasn’t bought them out.

IgorPartola 6y ago
Yes because the only thing better than a medium sized company that won’t license its patents is a megacorp that won’t license its patents /s No the solution is to incentivize patent licensing and in the case of software make it simply not patentable. The corporate overlords won’t save us from themselves. If they had their way patents would simply never expire.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  A megacorp sitting on some patents can and will still release a whole range of mass market products (large volumes, so has to be cheap) that uses those patents and makes it available to the masses. A medium sized company can't really do that, so at best they will release a niche product that makes it available to a few people.
  - syshum 6y ago
    MegaCorp (like say Amazon) would lock the tech up so only their products have it, So instead of being able to pick from a Kindle PaperWhite, OnyxBook, and a Remarkable you would only have the Kindle... and varitions of the Kindle Medium Corp will license their patent (at extreme rates) to other companies MegaCorp will not. Medium Corp is better than MegaCorp for consumers most of the time. FRAND licensing even batter, and No Patents at all even better
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  Your first sentence, but unironically. Big corp probably isn't as devoted to milking one IP asset to the detriment of its adoption. And they may have the resources to make more products in-house that utilize the tech. I agree that the patent system needs modification in the long run, though.
  - 6y ago

spoonjim 6y ago

If the patent holding company hadn’t bothered, e-ink would barely exist though.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
notRobot 6y ago
If they'd been less strict with their patents then lots of other companies would've been able to innovate in the space. See comments about 3D printer from above in the thread: > Don’t forget 3D printing that also only really started when patents expired. > Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing.