> Looking up their patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation?page=3 https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation?page=3...), looks

> Looking up their patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation?page=3 https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation?page=3...), looks like their earliest patents are from 1998, so those should be expired already. everytime this topic of EInk comes up, people on HN seem to claim there's a patent thing. I ask the simple question of which patent is blocking, and I get lazy answers like patent thicket. To be frank, I suspect those who make that comment aren't actually directly involved in the industry. I've been to SID and other display conferences and the real problem is physics and also lack of funding. What I know is that EInk can't get to the lower cost pricepoint without solving the scale problem which means getting an order for millions of displays. They can't solve cheap large panels because that would require solving yield issues which again becomes a matter of scale. Startups show up but can't get the billion or so that's needed to get to scale. You can see this pattern repeated with companies like Mirasol. The real problem is that nobody wants to put millions into making displays when they could get higher ROI from putting it into another hot AI/ML or internet service company.