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E-ink is one of those techs that only advanced when large batches of patents expire. E-ink the company has tied up the tech stack in so many patents, NDA's, and

• _Microft 6y ago
  Don’t forget 3D printing that also only really started when patents expired.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • systemvoltage 6y ago
    Between 2007-2009, 80+ Stratasys patents expired. Think about this - a single company holding back the world in advancing forward in 3D printing. Orthogonally, ever wondered why memory on your PC is so expensive? Thanks to Micron, Hynix and Samsung triopoly.
    • dragosmocrii 6y ago
      Can you elaborate on the memory pricing?
      • dsr_ 6y ago
        Here's an article from 2011 doing Moore's Law extrapolation of RAM and disk prices: https://antranik.org/using-moores-law-to-predict-future-memory-trends/ https://antranik.org/using-moores-law-to-predict-future-memo... RAM, 2011: "A single 8GB stick of RAM is about $80 right now. In 2021, you’d be able to buy a single stick of RAM that contains 64GB for the same price." Disks, 2011: "The price of a 1-terabyte hard drive is $80 now... In 2013, a 2TB drive will be $80. In 2015, a 4TB drive will be $80. After that the doubling rate may lengthen to 3 years instead of 2 years so.. In 2018, an 8TB drive will be $80. And finally in 2021, for $80, you’d be able to buy a 16 terabyte hard drive"
        • ivegotnoaccount 6y ago
          Is applying Moore's law relevant, since the manufacturing process of DRAM is hugely different from the one for usual chips (limited by capacitor size, not transistor one) ? Same goes for hard drives. Not saying that price gouging has nothing to do with this, but simply saying "Moore's law was not followed" does in no way imply something interfered with it.
        • Someone 6y ago
          I don’t think it’s fair to expect hard drive capacity/$ to grow exponentially forever. Certainly for consumer hard drives, there’s a cost of getting the drive to the customer (transport, shop rent, employee salaries, etc) which is, at best, fixed. If manufacturing costs drop to zero, price will approach that fixed cost (plus any markup sellers manage to extract, for example by marketing their drives as better/more hip/etc.)
        • mendelmaleh 6y ago
          For the record, it's 2021 and the cheapest 16tb hard drive on pcpartpicker is $335. For $80 you can get a cheap 4tb hard drive.
          • treeman79 6y ago
            When I was a kid, me and a friend would be amazed at a 25,000 dollar 1 TB multi hd array. We couldn’t imagine how anyone would ever need so much space.
        • loeg 6y ago
          Moore's law was (1) an observation of historical data and (2) never a guarantee by vendors to make higher capacity products at lower prices. The extrapolation is just nonsense wishful thinking.
        • hyperpallium2 6y ago
          lcd screens didn't fall in price because of an international criminal price-fixing conspiracy. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT-LCD_(Flat_Panel)_Antitrust_Litigation https://wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT-LCD_(Flat_Panel)_Antitrust_Li...
    • spoonjim 6y ago
      But isn’t it those same companies that are the reason that memory isn’t $1000/megabyte?
      • mynameisvlad 6y ago
        I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say here. Are you implying that they could price gouge even more than they already are and are keeping prices relatively low out of the goodness of their hearts?
        • est31 6y ago
          I think their point is that these companies gave us cheap memory in the first place. Which is an important thing to remember. The distruptors of days past are the monopolists of today. And they themselves will be disrupted one day.
          • SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
            > The distruptors of days past are the monopolists of today. And they themselves will be disrupted one day. I can think of a few that can’t be disrupted soon enough.
        • ericd 6y ago
          They're saying it used to be that much, and now it's orders of magnitude less, thanks in part to those companies.
      • systemvoltage 6y ago
        I am not sure if I understand your point.
    • rudedogg 6y ago
      > Orthogonally, ever wondered why memory on your PC is so expensive? Thanks to Micron, Hynix and Samsung triopoly. Should have mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing. It's not just speculative.
• syshum 6y ago
  Another example of how IP laws have become an enemy of the goals society had when passing them, which is not to enrich a few corporations but to incentivize innovation, but now it is clear copyright, and patents today are doing far more HARM to innovation than they advance it As such we as a society need to look hard at those laws and policies to reform them Sadly the large corporations have a huge amounts of lobby money and are rapidly attempting to get the terrible IP laws codified into complex international treaties to ensure no nation can do any reform at all
  • D13Fd 6y ago
    I strongly disagree about patents. This is the patent system working as designed. It incentivized a company to invent a new thing, and gave them a monopoly for a reasonable amount of time (20 years). When it ends, others can operate in the space. I agree about copyright, though. Copyright has been expanded to cover software and even APIs. Copyright is a giant drag on innovation. A single company can tie up a space for life of the author plus 70 years, which is absurd. Copyright should never have applied to most forms of software, which clearly fall into the exceptions of 17 USC § 102(b). But we are where we are.
    • syshum 6y ago
      Clearly it is not, e-Ink, 3d printing, VR, and hosts of other technology has been held back not advanced because of patents Now that is not to say I would advocate for complete removal of the patent systems but I do think Compulsory FRAND style licensing should be a requirement of obtaining a patent Your distinction between Copyright and Patent is also strang as the suffer from the same flaw so it seems your only justification is that you believe 20 years is "reasonable" but Life is not I think both are unreasonable, I would personally like to see both dropped to 10 years, or some compromise where you get 2-3 years exclusive use of the creation then have some kind of compulsory license where the creator is compensated but can not with hold the creation for 20 years (with some kind of scheme that the license be fair and equitable)
      • vikramkr 6y ago
• mrfusion 6y ago
  Speaking of that, I’d love to get an alert whenever a major patent like that expires. It would help predict the tech landscape a few years out. Anyone know of any major expirations in the next few years?
  • bastawhiz 6y ago
    The trouble is knowing what patents are "big". There are few good signals for patents that are holding back innovation.
• oezi 6y ago
  And this is why patent duration should be tied to product lifecycle length. Pharma where you need 10 years to pull off clinical trials could keep 23 years, but consumer hardware where new generation of devices launch within 2 years should be limited to 10 years. Software should likely be limited to 5 years.
  • MontyCarloHall 6y ago
    Alternatively, make the cost to renew a patent each year increase exponentially, with the base proportional to the worth of the individual/company filing the patent at the time of filing. That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time, which is the rationale for having patents in the first place. A company could only afford to hold onto a patent for as long as it causes the company’s revenue to grow exponentially. Once the patented technology matures and growth plateaus, keeping the patent would become prohibitively expensive. This would completely eliminate patent trolls and patent squatting/speculative patents.
    • oezi 6y ago
      Getting exponential curves right is very tricky though (just look at Covid). I believe using such escalating fees would just favor the big companies who can stay ahead of the curve. Another idea I think worth exploring is mandatory licensing at fixed rates which decline over years and/or are tied to revenue the patent holder generates with the patent. The goal really should be to increase utility of the patent for the public.
      • kortilla 6y ago
        > I believe using such escalating fees would just favor the big companies who can stay ahead of the curve. But that’s fine. If a company can rake in so much money off of one product it’s still providing an obscene amount of value.
        • nicoburns 6y ago
• curioussavage 6y ago
  Well there haven’t really been any competing technologies either. Maybe tcl nxtpaper will push eink forward. Or ultimately kill it
• Fordec 6y ago
  I'd love a newsletter that tracked what patents were expiring on any given week. I'm pretty ignorant of what's coming down the pipeline from a legal perspective.
• feb 6y ago
  Patents have stalled technology in many areas since a long time. The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" [1] by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine analyze the economical impact of patterns on society. They give some surprising examples, like how the Wright brothers invested heavily in patents and legal actions to stiffle competition instead of continuing development of airplanes. [1] http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
  • warmwaffles 6y ago
    Firearms industry had this as well. Smith & Wesson for the longest time fought tooth and nail to be the only revolver manufacturer in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
• userbinator 6y ago
  What perplexes me more is not the patents (since they are public information), but the NDAs. They could've kept the underlying technology and manufacturing process patented, while at the same time selling mass quantities of the displays to everyone who wants to buy some and freely publishing all the information on how to drive them (which actually turns out to be not that difficult.) I bet that would actually get them more profit than the situation today. That has not stopped the more creative and resourceful individuals, however: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14124086 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGVZCEuoccE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGVZCEuoccE
• crazygringo 6y ago
  Just to play devil's advocate, that's the whole purpose of patents, to prevent progress by others. On the other hand, the gain is that E Ink Corporation decided it was worth investing in developing and commercializing the technology knowing they'd have exclusive rights for 20 years, and quite possible only because of that. If they didn't have that guarantee, it might not have been worth any company developing it in the first place. Now I'm not familiar with the history of investment in e-ink specifically. But I'm curious if there's anyone here who is: if patent protection wasn't available, would it have been worth it for any company to develop it, knowing it might be copied a year later by a competitor who would then undercut the original inventors (not having to pay for the expensive R&D)?
  • rudolph9 6y ago
    It’s important to remember every laws has trade offs, including patent laws. Perhaps patents stiffened e-ink but OP seems to have issue with patents in general which it would be hard to argue universally prevent innovation.
    • Qwertious 6y ago
      The purpose of patents is to give innovators a temporary competitive advantage, by forcing competitors to pay royalties for the patent. The main problem is "temporary", as patents have a flat duration but fields innovate and turn over at different speeds - compare web software to aeronautics/NASA software. The former could potentially he outdated within months, the latter likely won't be used until it's been tested for decades. So obviously a 30-year patent is potentially paralyzing in webdev, yet might even be too short in space tech! The problem is there simply isn't any duration that can satisfy both fields. Meanwhile, often patents don't benefit anyone because they're 1) more trouble than they're worth to actually enforce, and only serve to reinforce the incumbents who don't need them, and 2) are in some cases deliberately written to be meaningless and uncommunicative, which defeats the purpose of open publishing in the first place. Every law might have upsides, but that doesn't change the fact that patents are fundamentally flawed.
      • 6y ago
• rubinesq 6y ago
  > E-ink is one of those techs that only advanced when large batches of patents expire. I don't really understand how this is true. If I google, I don't see any evidence that any patent or block of patents is blocking the "tech". Could you specify which specific patent is blocking? > tied up the tech stack in so many patents, NDA's, and exorbitant prices that no one wants to touch it. But... you do realize there's lots of startups that enter the bistable display space? eg: ClearInk. https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/ https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/ They even use the exact same underlying principle which is electrophoresis. If you go to any display conference you'll easily see that most of what you're saying comes across as highly inaccurate or even ridiculous.
  • Jallal 6y ago
    There's something very fishy about ClearInk. I checked their website to see what their technology looks like. I wanted to see how their product compare to a eInk screen use in many devices (such as Kindle/Kobo/ReMarkable), as this is the kind of products that interests me. It turns out that all the pictures shows the back of what I expect to be tablets/phone prototypes (or maybe it's just stock photos), and not a single time the screen. It's almost comical : you advertise for a screen tech, but you carefully avoid to show how such screen looks like. Definitely a red flag.
    • rubinesq 6y ago
      > It's almost comical : you advertise for a screen tech, but you carefully avoid to show how such screen looks like. Definitely a red flag. Are you an E Ink employee or something trying to badmouth clearink? Because you can just go to youtube and search clearink and find clear videos of their products from various conferences.
      • Jallal 6y ago
        I'm not related to any of those company in any way. I do not work in this field, and to be quite honest, before your comment, I did not even know about ClearLink. I've highlighted something that makes no sense. Do you expect a car manufacturer not showing one of its cars on its website ? Apple not to how its iPhone ? A SaaS company not showing screen captures of its product ? I don't. Those images should be easily available without having to browse YouTube, or do a search on google. FWIW, I would actually welcome any concurrent to eInk and its monopoly. I totally share the point of view of the top comment, as I've seen this tech stagnate for years. Most of the supposed alternatives 10 years ago(PlasticLogic, Liquavista, Mirasol, etc.) either never produced something relevant, either failed the expectations. I actually find your comment quite disrespectful: if you want to promote a product, you can do that without having to resort to ad hominem attacks. Anyway, thanks for the YouTube tip: I was able to see what I wanted to see. Edit: if some employee of ClearInk see this message, do yourself a favor and update your website with some pictures of your product, or even a embedded Youtube video. It will speak more than stock photos.
• crvdgc 6y ago
  > as no-one can afford everyone else's patent licensing fees A patent deadlock.
• chandra381 6y ago
  There is also an issue of maintainability and spare parts. For example, the technology behind how phone screens work is broadly understood, leading to people being able to replace their phone screens if they are broken or no longer working. There is no such thing for Kindle or e-readers more generally, because a lot of this is hidden in patents. so if you're a consumer and want to purchase one, and it breaks somehow you're SOL.