21 ms·

Throaway to not get sued. E-ink, the company, holds the patents of the pigment core tech that makes "paper-like" displays possible and strongarms the display m

Throaway to not get sued. E-ink, the company, holds the patents of the pigment core tech that makes "paper-like" displays possible and strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays to absolute silence. Any research project or startup that comes up with a better alternative technology gets bought out or buried by their lawyers ASAP. E-ink don't make the display themselves, they make the e-ink film, filled with their patented pigment particles and sell it to display manufacturers who package the film in glass and a TFT layer and add a driver interface chip, all of which are proprietary AF and unless you're the size of Amazon, forget about getting any detailed datasheets about how to correctly drive their displays to get sharp images. In my previous company we had to reverse engineer their waveforms in order to build usable products even though we were buying quite a lot of displays. With so much control over the IP and the entire supply chain and due to the broken nature of the patent system, they're an absolute monopoly and have no incentive to lower prices or to bring any innovations to the market and are a textbook example of what happens to technology when there is zero competition. So, when you see the high prices of e-paper gadgets, don't blame the manufacturers, as they're not price gouging, blame E-ink, as their displays make up the bulk of the BOM. Tough, some of their tech is pretty dope. One day E-ink sent over a 32" 1440p prototype panel with 32 shades of B&W to show off. My God, was the picture gorgeous and sharp. I would have loved to have it as a PC monitor so I tried building an HDMI interface controller for it with an FPGA but failed due to a lack of time and documentation. Shame, although not a big loss as an estimated cost for that was near the five figure ballpark and the current consumption was astronomical, sometimes triggering the protection of the power supply on certain images.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
It’s so silly though, have they done real correct math on how much more they would make if everyone used it?
- schnevets 6y ago
  My mind immediately went to the most recent episode of NPR's Planet Money, where they explored buying rights to one of Marvel/Disney's +7,000 characters. Specifically, they tried licensing Doorman, an obscure joke of a hero who can teleport others. Although they never said it outright, it sounded like the main deterrent is just anyone else making money with an angle Disney hadn't explored. It sounds similar to eInk refusing millions if it means someone else makes a greater fortune.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Volume doesn't always equate to greater profit. High margin luxury goods are a valid business strategy too. I'm sure they're doing the thing that their data points to as netting them the largest profit.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    FWIW, I believe this has been debunked. Volume (when there is a net margin) always equates to greater profit until market saturation. Veblen goods rarely work for niche markets but can work for commodity markets (see cars and watches for examples).
    - weberer 6y ago
      Then why are there diamond cartels?
      - ChuckMcM 6y ago
        You aren't serious right? I mean there is a whole article on DeBeers (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/304575/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...).
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      I'm not saying it's a Veblen good. I'm saying that even though the demand drops as the price goes up, it may well not drop so far that it's a loss of net profit to sell at high margin. They do, after all, have a monopoly on the good. If you're saying that even holding a monopoly, the most profitable price point is at market saturation, I'd need to see something backing that. And also what you mean by market saturation; the cost of parts for an iPhone 11 Pro is estimated to be ~$490. The list price is, what, $1100? You're basically saying that either they've already achieved market saturation, and would gain no new customers dropping the price to $600 (parts + $100 for distribution, assembly, etc), or that they're leaving money on the table. I find both of those very hard to believe. So maybe I'm misunderstanding you?
  - 6y ago
helmholtz 6y ago
I've heard this narrative before quite often. My follow up question is, is there an end in sight? Is there reason to be hopeful that, later this decade for instance, things might get better and we might have 27" high PPI e-ink monitors available around the same price as a typical LCD?
- varjag 6y ago
  Patents expire after 20 years.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Looking up their patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation?page=36 https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation?page=3...), looks like their earliest patents are from 1998, so those should be expired already. That said, there's 36 pages of patents that seem related, so I'm sure that newly made e-ink technology will be covered by the newer patents.
    - ianai 6y ago
      I wonder if the market based solution is for their IP to be bought by someone seeking to make products. And what that would cost.
      - alisonkisk 6y ago
        It would cost the sum of as what it costs now, probably? There's not much of a market-based solution to a legally protected monopoly. The best you can hope for is to higher demand at lower price points that makes a lower price profitable
        ianai 6y ago
        Theory says it should cost some multiple of whatever revenue they’re making on it y/y now. And it’d be worth it if the buyer knew they could grow that revenue substantially compared to interest rates.
m-p-3 6y ago
Seriously, I hope their patents expire ASAP. They're hampering the technological progress of e-paper devices with their iron grip on the technology.
- mottosso 6y ago
  I can see what you mean but on the other hand; are they really, though? If they hadn't come up with the technology and written the patents in the first place, we wouldn't even be here talking about it.
  - sunshinerag 6y ago
    good answer
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    True, but there should be mandatory tech licensing at least so they can't just suffocate progress.
    - jounker 6y ago
      Why? It’s the payoff of a limited monopoly that justifies the investment in the research. Without that incentive progress might be even further restricted.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    You can come up with technology without patenting it though. If there were no patents then presumably companies would find other ways to make money from inventions, for example by being the best at producing them or improving them more frequently. Consider Linux, a bunch of companies have made bank from that.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    In all likelihood, they did the initial research with public funding or built on such research. Since the 1980s academia has been a get rich scheme where the public funds research and then the professors go to the private sector to make money. I think the inventors should be rewarded, but it seems misguided to do it by making them have to exploit an exclusive hold on their invention which blockades progress. Why not just give them prize money? You could set objective standards whereby a new invention that gets produced over X quantity by any party gets Y prize money.
xxr 6y ago
>the current consumption was astronomical, sometimes triggering the protection of the power supply on certain images That's surprising, since I was always under the impression that E-Ink displays were pretty low-power. Is it the drawing of the new image that requires so much energy in a small instant?
- nine_k 6y ago
  E-ink is zero power when displaying the picture. But moving all these tiny ink particles around takes a lot of energy. I suspect that low refresh rates are partly due to the problems of power delivery to the pixels via transparent conductors.
- retrac 6y ago
  E-ink has no draw when static, but changing from white to black or back involves a physical state change that takes quite a lot of energy. Many eink readers rate their battery life in number of full screen refreshes.
danaos 6y ago
Have you heard of Clearink? [1] They are using a different technology which appears to be superior. One can hope they will be reaching market soon. https://clearinkdisplays.com/ https://clearinkdisplays.com/
- codethief 6y ago
  I had never heard of Clearink before but, damn, their tech does look quite impressive[0]! I would LOVE to see a ReMarkable with such a screen! At @4:08 the company representative says > Our current schedule is to bring gen-1 productions to the market in 2020 Well, I guess I'll be crossing my fingers that it'll happen as soon as this pandemic over. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjJ2-cdhwMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjJ2-cdhwMQ
- therein 6y ago
  Is that what one would find in those color e-ink HiSense phones?
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    No they usually use Kaleido. They don't specify but it matches with the poor color saturation and 4096 colors. Kaleido is a b/w eink panel with a colour LCD overlaid. There's tech that looks much better like eInk's ACeP (much stronger color saturation) but it needs multiple flashing refreshes to update so it's not feasible for interactive devices. They're just being marketed for advertising and the like.
- cosmotic 6y ago
  All these product shots look fake and I don't see any specifications, just vague claims. I'm curious in what way it seems superior.
  - danaos 6y ago
    They have short response times and higher refresh rates. Their online videos show video capable devices.
iso8859-1 6y ago
Why can't a Chinese company clone their product and kill them?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  They could replace E-Ink in China, and maybe they already have. But China's disregard for IP protections doesn't mean that goods created in China that violate international IP agreements can be exported.
  - mieses 6y ago
    Boox exports to the US and violates GPL.
    - yorwba 6y ago
      Has anyone tried to enforce it against them?
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Many US companies violate GPL
    - pabs3 6y ago
      If you are aware of a particular GPL violation, please report it to the project being violated. For the Linux kernel, that would be Software Freedom Conservancy, who recently announced a new strategy for achieving GPL compliance. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/ https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/ https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-strategy.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-st... https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liberation.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liber... https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/oct/01/new-copyleft-strategy-launched-with-ARDC-grant/ https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/oct/01/new-copyleft-stra...
- mywittyname 6y ago
  They could easily clone & kill the technology itself. The problem comes from the fact that e-ink is worthless unless it is attached to a device with really strong vendor support. And any vendor worth a damn doesn't want to be the target of a billion dollar lawsuit. So the choice is between an overpriced device from a major player, or a cheap device with next to no support from a no-name vendor.
robomartin 6y ago
I understand where you are coming from. I have a love-hate relationship with patents. That said, I try not to pass judgement on such things until I fully understand the story (not saying you don't). For example, if a technology took ten years and ten billion dollars to develop to the point of it being commercially viable, well, yeah, a patent-protected monopoly is likely the ethically correct privilege the inventors should be granted. An example (out of many) of bullshit patents and monopolies that should have never been granted are the horseshit patents Color Kinetics got years ago. These people had the audacity to patent the use of pulse-width-modulation to control the intensity of LEDs and make lights that could produce different colors. The patent office granted these people patent after patent. Once they had enough they started to attack the entire LED industry. Philips ended-up acquiring them. They let the industry know they would not enforce the bullshit patents. Still, the crooks took their thievery all the way to the bank. ----- As for the relative cost of LCD's vs. E-ink. I think the primary difference is very simple: Volume. I haven't done the numbers, but I think I can say that the LCD industry is at least 1,000 times larger in volume. It's like the LCD vs. OLED comparison. Volume is king. Another element is the tooling-up for manufacturing. A modern LCD manufacturing plant runs in the billions. Two billion dollars the last time I checked, but I haven't been in the industry for ten years and have lost touch. You are not going to take a multi-billion-dollar factory and slice-off a corner to make e-ink displays. These factories are highly automated and tuned machines. They are designed to make millions of displays per month. This means that making e-ink displays requires putting-up a specialized factory or retooling an old LCD factory that might no-longer be competitive for making LCD's. Regardless of the approach, this is likely to be a very expensive undertaking. That, coupled with lower volume, is guaranteed to translate into higher prices. Disclaimer: I was in the high performance display business for ten years. Exited a decade ago. So, yeah, I am a little disconnected as to the latest and greatest and what might be new in manufacturing. That said, I get the sense that material changes haven't been as significant in the last ten years as they were during the prior ten.
- robinsoh 6y ago
  > This means that making e-ink displays requires putting-up a specialized factory or retooling an old LCD factory that might no-longer be competitive for making LCD's. Regardless of the approach, this is likely to be a very expensive undertaking. That, coupled with lower volume, is guaranteed to translate into higher prices. I think your observation is much more accurate than the other speculations about patents I have seen.
neonological 6y ago
The question is, If the patent system didn't allow the inventor to screw with the market and take advantage of everybody would they have had the incentive in the first place to develop the technology? So yes the patent is responsible for the existence of the monopoly, but it is also responsible for the existence of the product that the monopoly is built upon. I think a 10 year limit on the monopoly is a good compromise (which is basically what the patent system is already doing). Even with those companies patenting DNA... after 10 years the argument is over.
- pfortuny 6y ago
  geometric increase in the patent permit price.
RantyDave 6y ago
I've done a little work with e-ink displays. My God, is that stuff a pain in the arse or what.
robinsoh 6y ago
> E-ink, the company, holds the patents of the pigment core tech that makes "paper-like" displays possible and strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays to absolute silence. Any research project or startup that comes up with a better alternative technology gets bought out or buried by their lawyers ASAP. Wow, that is a very serious allegation. But I googled and googled and googled, and found not even one such lawsuit. I also see competing tech like Clearink. Could you show us proof that what you claimed about "buried by their lawyers" is actually occurring?
dfabulich 6y ago
E-Ink's patents are only a symptom of the deeper problem. Consider: why wasn't Panasonic able to capture all of the patents for LCD displays? If "patents" explained the problem, then why are high-resolution color screens so cheap? IMO, the answer to this question is that there are simply more ways to implement color LCD displays than there are ways to implement e-paper displays (as far as we know). Other firms could design electronic-paper displays, but they're all going to work basically the same as E-ink displays, so they'll run afoul of E-ink's patents. FWIW, the LCD "tech tree" got wider after the early 1970s patents started expiring in the 1990s; that's when LCD prices started to fall. Maybe the same will happen to e-paper when E-ink's earliest patents start expiring, but it's no guarantee. As long as the tech tree remains narrow, E-ink could control the market for decades more yet.
unityByFreedom 6y ago
Patents encourage innovation. In exchange for publishing your tech, you get protection from those who might copy it for ~10-20 years. You get to make money from it and the world benefits from knowing the details of your technology. Software patents are the ones that make no sense because software is already protected by copyright and patents were never intended to protect algorithms.
- kiba 6y ago
  Patents encourage innovation. In exchange for publishing your tech, you get protection from those who might copy it for ~10-20 years. You get to make money from it and the world benefits from knowing the details of your technology. This is stated theory of why patents work, not actual evidence that they work.
  - unityByFreedom 6y ago
    The alternative is easy to imagine. Companies either do not innovate or they protect IP on their own by keeping it secret. That may entail keeping headcount low and more overhead for security. So, less jobs, less innovation, less sharing of development, and more duplication of security efforts that are shared by every company. Getting rid of patents would be a recipe for further entrenching existing wealth. You'd have no protection from a major corporation replicating your garage-company's processes. As it is, companies have a hard enough time fending off the likes of China which does not respect western IP.
_ph_ 6y ago
The patent situation and the marketing behavior of E-ink are certainly important factors. But it doesn't explain why those companies, which do create E-ink devices often are not innovative. The Kindle is a nice piece of hardware and some of the models are even cheap. But why isn't there a better software on it, making it a really versatile device? Same with most e-reading competitors. Few offer anything beyond the reading capability and basically none are programmable by the user. Just having a Kindle tuned for being end-user programming friendly would be huge. That is one thing I got my reMarkable2 for. It is a great device and very useful. But one thing stands out: it runs Linux and offers you shell access. You can just upload your own programs to it and tweak many things. Even just having the ability to upload your own "power off" picture to it is a really nice thing[1]. If the makers of the reMarkable would push a bit more into the direction of enabling users to create software, as in documenting the system and creating APIs/libraries to use for integration into the existing software stack, this could grow enormously. The hardware is great, now comes the software. What I dream of, would be scenarios which make great use of the always-visible screen content. Like a dashboard which shows you your upcoming appointments, unread notifications, perhaps just the weather status. It refreshes every 5 minutes but otherwise doesn't consume energy or distract you with animations. Or being able to control the e-Reader from your computer. Reading a man-page? Why not send it to the e-Ink screen and have it displayed there until some other content is sent? Like a book which you keep open beside your computer, just remotely configurable. So much things could be done by just adding software to existing e-Ink hardware. And if such an environment grows, probably so will the hardware offerings targeting this market. 1: my favorite lock screen image is the GoT map "The North 02". It is unbelievable on the e-Ink and looks like printed on paper.
- robinsoh 6y ago
  > If the makers of the reMarkable would push a bit more into the direction of enabling users to create software, as in documenting the system and creating APIs/libraries to use for integration into the existing software stack, this could grow enormously. The hardware is great, now comes the software. The remarkable is fully open source isn't it? Have any users done work towards adding functionality?
  - 6y ago
NoOneNew 6y ago
Can you or someone else with more business tech knowledge explain this to me... historically, we have seen companies with patented or controlled environments open up their tech to various levels and see overwhelming success. Fuck-you-money levels of success. While I do understand wanting to keep a tech patent a little close to the chest, a tech patent seems to generate Scrouge Mcduck money when they hug as many devs as possible. Why do we still see this ass backwards patent holding? 30% of millions/billions of small berry pies is far better than 99% of one medium sized cow pie. Any good reason why Eink is that way? Just plain stupid or is there a good reason?

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

It’s so silly though, have they done real correct math on how much more they would make if everyone used it?

schnevets 6y ago
My mind immediately went to the most recent episode of NPR's Planet Money, where they explored buying rights to one of Marvel/Disney's +7,000 characters. Specifically, they tried licensing Doorman, an obscure joke of a hero who can teleport others. Although they never said it outright, it sounded like the main deterrent is just anyone else making money with an angle Disney hadn't explored. It sounds similar to eInk refusing millions if it means someone else makes a greater fortune.
lostcolony 6y ago
Volume doesn't always equate to greater profit. High margin luxury goods are a valid business strategy too. I'm sure they're doing the thing that their data points to as netting them the largest profit.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  FWIW, I believe this has been debunked. Volume (when there is a net margin) always equates to greater profit until market saturation. Veblen goods rarely work for niche markets but can work for commodity markets (see cars and watches for examples).
  - weberer 6y ago
    Then why are there diamond cartels?
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      You aren't serious right? I mean there is a whole article on DeBeers (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/304575/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...).
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    I'm not saying it's a Veblen good. I'm saying that even though the demand drops as the price goes up, it may well not drop so far that it's a loss of net profit to sell at high margin. They do, after all, have a monopoly on the good. If you're saying that even holding a monopoly, the most profitable price point is at market saturation, I'd need to see something backing that. And also what you mean by market saturation; the cost of parts for an iPhone 11 Pro is estimated to be ~$490. The list price is, what, $1100? You're basically saying that either they've already achieved market saturation, and would gain no new customers dropping the price to $600 (parts + $100 for distribution, assembly, etc), or that they're leaving money on the table. I find both of those very hard to believe. So maybe I'm misunderstanding you?
- 6y ago

helmholtz 6y ago

I've heard this narrative before quite often. My follow up question is, is there an end in sight? Is there reason to be hopeful that, later this decade for instance, things might get better and we might have 27" high PPI e-ink monitors available around the same price as a typical LCD?

varjag 6y ago
Patents expire after 20 years.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Looking up their patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation?page=36 https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation?page=3...), looks like their earliest patents are from 1998, so those should be expired already. That said, there's 36 pages of patents that seem related, so I'm sure that newly made e-ink technology will be covered by the newer patents.
  - ianai 6y ago
    I wonder if the market based solution is for their IP to be bought by someone seeking to make products. And what that would cost.
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      It would cost the sum of as what it costs now, probably? There's not much of a market-based solution to a legally protected monopoly. The best you can hope for is to higher demand at lower price points that makes a lower price profitable
      - ianai 6y ago
        Theory says it should cost some multiple of whatever revenue they’re making on it y/y now. And it’d be worth it if the buyer knew they could grow that revenue substantially compared to interest rates.

m-p-3 6y ago

Seriously, I hope their patents expire ASAP. They're hampering the technological progress of e-paper devices with their iron grip on the technology.

mottosso 6y ago
I can see what you mean but on the other hand; are they really, though? If they hadn't come up with the technology and written the patents in the first place, we wouldn't even be here talking about it.
- sunshinerag 6y ago
  good answer
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  True, but there should be mandatory tech licensing at least so they can't just suffocate progress.
  - jounker 6y ago
    Why? It’s the payoff of a limited monopoly that justifies the investment in the research. Without that incentive progress might be even further restricted.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  You can come up with technology without patenting it though. If there were no patents then presumably companies would find other ways to make money from inventions, for example by being the best at producing them or improving them more frequently. Consider Linux, a bunch of companies have made bank from that.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  In all likelihood, they did the initial research with public funding or built on such research. Since the 1980s academia has been a get rich scheme where the public funds research and then the professors go to the private sector to make money. I think the inventors should be rewarded, but it seems misguided to do it by making them have to exploit an exclusive hold on their invention which blockades progress. Why not just give them prize money? You could set objective standards whereby a new invention that gets produced over X quantity by any party gets Y prize money.

xxr 6y ago

>the current consumption was astronomical, sometimes triggering the protection of the power supply on certain images That's surprising, since I was always under the impression that E-Ink displays were pretty low-power. Is it the drawing of the new image that requires so much energy in a small instant?

nine_k 6y ago
E-ink is zero power when displaying the picture. But moving all these tiny ink particles around takes a lot of energy. I suspect that low refresh rates are partly due to the problems of power delivery to the pixels via transparent conductors.
retrac 6y ago
E-ink has no draw when static, but changing from white to black or back involves a physical state change that takes quite a lot of energy. Many eink readers rate their battery life in number of full screen refreshes.

danaos 6y ago

Have you heard of Clearink? [1] They are using a different technology which appears to be superior. One can hope they will be reaching market soon. https://clearinkdisplays.com/ https://clearinkdisplays.com/

codethief 6y ago
I had never heard of Clearink before but, damn, their tech does look quite impressive[0]! I would LOVE to see a ReMarkable with such a screen! At @4:08 the company representative says > Our current schedule is to bring gen-1 productions to the market in 2020 Well, I guess I'll be crossing my fingers that it'll happen as soon as this pandemic over. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjJ2-cdhwMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjJ2-cdhwMQ
therein 6y ago
Is that what one would find in those color e-ink HiSense phones?
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  No they usually use Kaleido. They don't specify but it matches with the poor color saturation and 4096 colors. Kaleido is a b/w eink panel with a colour LCD overlaid. There's tech that looks much better like eInk's ACeP (much stronger color saturation) but it needs multiple flashing refreshes to update so it's not feasible for interactive devices. They're just being marketed for advertising and the like.
cosmotic 6y ago
All these product shots look fake and I don't see any specifications, just vague claims. I'm curious in what way it seems superior.
- danaos 6y ago
  They have short response times and higher refresh rates. Their online videos show video capable devices.

iso8859-1 6y ago

Why can't a Chinese company clone their product and kill them?

dodobirdlord 6y ago
They could replace E-Ink in China, and maybe they already have. But China's disregard for IP protections doesn't mean that goods created in China that violate international IP agreements can be exported.
- mieses 6y ago
  Boox exports to the US and violates GPL.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    Has anyone tried to enforce it against them?
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Many US companies violate GPL
  - pabs3 6y ago
    If you are aware of a particular GPL violation, please report it to the project being violated. For the Linux kernel, that would be Software Freedom Conservancy, who recently announced a new strategy for achieving GPL compliance. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/ https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/ https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-strategy.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-st... https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liberation.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liber... https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/oct/01/new-copyleft-strategy-launched-with-ARDC-grant/ https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/oct/01/new-copyleft-stra...
mywittyname 6y ago
They could easily clone & kill the technology itself. The problem comes from the fact that e-ink is worthless unless it is attached to a device with really strong vendor support. And any vendor worth a damn doesn't want to be the target of a billion dollar lawsuit. So the choice is between an overpriced device from a major player, or a cheap device with next to no support from a no-name vendor.

robomartin 6y ago

I understand where you are coming from. I have a love-hate relationship with patents. That said, I try not to pass judgement on such things until I fully understand the story (not saying you don't). For example, if a technology took ten years and ten billion dollars to develop to the point of it being commercially viable, well, yeah, a patent-protected monopoly is likely the ethically correct privilege the inventors should be granted. An example (out of many) of bullshit patents and monopolies that should have never been granted are the horseshit patents Color Kinetics got years ago. These people had the audacity to patent the use of pulse-width-modulation to control the intensity of LEDs and make lights that could produce different colors. The patent office granted these people patent after patent. Once they had enough they started to attack the entire LED industry. Philips ended-up acquiring them. They let the industry know they would not enforce the bullshit patents. Still, the crooks took their thievery all the way to the bank. ----- As for the relative cost of LCD's vs. E-ink. I think the primary difference is very simple: Volume. I haven't done the numbers, but I think I can say that the LCD industry is at least 1,000 times larger in volume. It's like the LCD vs. OLED comparison. Volume is king. Another element is the tooling-up for manufacturing. A modern LCD manufacturing plant runs in the billions. Two billion dollars the last time I checked, but I haven't been in the industry for ten years and have lost touch. You are not going to take a multi-billion-dollar factory and slice-off a corner to make e-ink displays. These factories are highly automated and tuned machines. They are designed to make millions of displays per month. This means that making e-ink displays requires putting-up a specialized factory or retooling an old LCD factory that might no-longer be competitive for making LCD's. Regardless of the approach, this is likely to be a very expensive undertaking. That, coupled with lower volume, is guaranteed to translate into higher prices. Disclaimer: I was in the high performance display business for ten years. Exited a decade ago. So, yeah, I am a little disconnected as to the latest and greatest and what might be new in manufacturing. That said, I get the sense that material changes haven't been as significant in the last ten years as they were during the prior ten.

robinsoh 6y ago
> This means that making e-ink displays requires putting-up a specialized factory or retooling an old LCD factory that might no-longer be competitive for making LCD's. Regardless of the approach, this is likely to be a very expensive undertaking. That, coupled with lower volume, is guaranteed to translate into higher prices. I think your observation is much more accurate than the other speculations about patents I have seen.

neonological 6y ago

The question is, If the patent system didn't allow the inventor to screw with the market and take advantage of everybody would they have had the incentive in the first place to develop the technology? So yes the patent is responsible for the existence of the monopoly, but it is also responsible for the existence of the product that the monopoly is built upon. I think a 10 year limit on the monopoly is a good compromise (which is basically what the patent system is already doing). Even with those companies patenting DNA... after 10 years the argument is over.

pfortuny 6y ago
geometric increase in the patent permit price.

RantyDave 6y ago

I've done a little work with e-ink displays. My God, is that stuff a pain in the arse or what.

robinsoh 6y ago

> E-ink, the company, holds the patents of the pigment core tech that makes "paper-like" displays possible and strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays to absolute silence. Any research project or startup that comes up with a better alternative technology gets bought out or buried by their lawyers ASAP. Wow, that is a very serious allegation. But I googled and googled and googled, and found not even one such lawsuit. I also see competing tech like Clearink. Could you show us proof that what you claimed about "buried by their lawyers" is actually occurring?

dfabulich 6y ago

E-Ink's patents are only a symptom of the deeper problem. Consider: why wasn't Panasonic able to capture all of the patents for LCD displays? If "patents" explained the problem, then why are high-resolution color screens so cheap? IMO, the answer to this question is that there are simply more ways to implement color LCD displays than there are ways to implement e-paper displays (as far as we know). Other firms could design electronic-paper displays, but they're all going to work basically the same as E-ink displays, so they'll run afoul of E-ink's patents. FWIW, the LCD "tech tree" got wider after the early 1970s patents started expiring in the 1990s; that's when LCD prices started to fall. Maybe the same will happen to e-paper when E-ink's earliest patents start expiring, but it's no guarantee. As long as the tech tree remains narrow, E-ink could control the market for decades more yet.

unityByFreedom 6y ago

Patents encourage innovation. In exchange for publishing your tech, you get protection from those who might copy it for ~10-20 years. You get to make money from it and the world benefits from knowing the details of your technology. Software patents are the ones that make no sense because software is already protected by copyright and patents were never intended to protect algorithms.

kiba 6y ago
Patents encourage innovation. In exchange for publishing your tech, you get protection from those who might copy it for ~10-20 years. You get to make money from it and the world benefits from knowing the details of your technology. This is stated theory of why patents work, not actual evidence that they work.
- unityByFreedom 6y ago
  The alternative is easy to imagine. Companies either do not innovate or they protect IP on their own by keeping it secret. That may entail keeping headcount low and more overhead for security. So, less jobs, less innovation, less sharing of development, and more duplication of security efforts that are shared by every company. Getting rid of patents would be a recipe for further entrenching existing wealth. You'd have no protection from a major corporation replicating your garage-company's processes. As it is, companies have a hard enough time fending off the likes of China which does not respect western IP.

_ph_ 6y ago

The patent situation and the marketing behavior of E-ink are certainly important factors. But it doesn't explain why those companies, which do create E-ink devices often are not innovative. The Kindle is a nice piece of hardware and some of the models are even cheap. But why isn't there a better software on it, making it a really versatile device? Same with most e-reading competitors. Few offer anything beyond the reading capability and basically none are programmable by the user. Just having a Kindle tuned for being end-user programming friendly would be huge. That is one thing I got my reMarkable2 for. It is a great device and very useful. But one thing stands out: it runs Linux and offers you shell access. You can just upload your own programs to it and tweak many things. Even just having the ability to upload your own "power off" picture to it is a really nice thing[1]. If the makers of the reMarkable would push a bit more into the direction of enabling users to create software, as in documenting the system and creating APIs/libraries to use for integration into the existing software stack, this could grow enormously. The hardware is great, now comes the software. What I dream of, would be scenarios which make great use of the always-visible screen content. Like a dashboard which shows you your upcoming appointments, unread notifications, perhaps just the weather status. It refreshes every 5 minutes but otherwise doesn't consume energy or distract you with animations. Or being able to control the e-Reader from your computer. Reading a man-page? Why not send it to the e-Ink screen and have it displayed there until some other content is sent? Like a book which you keep open beside your computer, just remotely configurable. So much things could be done by just adding software to existing e-Ink hardware. And if such an environment grows, probably so will the hardware offerings targeting this market. 1: my favorite lock screen image is the GoT map "The North 02". It is unbelievable on the e-Ink and looks like printed on paper.

robinsoh 6y ago
> If the makers of the reMarkable would push a bit more into the direction of enabling users to create software, as in documenting the system and creating APIs/libraries to use for integration into the existing software stack, this could grow enormously. The hardware is great, now comes the software. The remarkable is fully open source isn't it? Have any users done work towards adding functionality?
- 6y ago

NoOneNew 6y ago

Can you or someone else with more business tech knowledge explain this to me... historically, we have seen companies with patented or controlled environments open up their tech to various levels and see overwhelming success. Fuck-you-money levels of success. While I do understand wanting to keep a tech patent a little close to the chest, a tech patent seems to generate Scrouge Mcduck money when they hug as many devs as possible. Why do we still see this ass backwards patent holding? 30% of millions/billions of small berry pies is far better than 99% of one medium sized cow pie. Any good reason why Eink is that way? Just plain stupid or is there a good reason?