>Anybody entering this field is looking at licensing (expensive if current e ink prices are anything to go by) No, that's a result of low economy of scale. LCD

>Anybody entering this field is looking at licensing (expensive if current e ink prices are anything to go by) No, that's a result of low economy of scale. LCDs have a massive market, whereas e.g. big e-ink screens have such a small market they're hand-fitted. You're presupposing your conclusion. I'm not disputing patents exist. I'm disputing whether they have a noticeable detrimental effect on the e-ink market. I mean, ARM has a licensing fee (of 1c per CPU), but nobody sane would blame that fee for x86 beating ARM in the desktop world. >The patent space around e ink is dominated by e ink corp over the last two decades. I'm not sure what your point here is. Yes, they're putting a ton of money into e-ink R&D. They're patenting everything they come up with, because that's how you monetize your R&D so it's not immediately copied by your competitors without seeing a cent of benefit. There are companies who have developed alternatives, such as Mirasol. That never took off, despite not needing any e-ink patents. This suggests that e-ink is sufficiently better than all alternatives that it's worth the patent cost - either because those alternatives were impractical, or because the patent fees for e-ink just weren't particularly cumbersome in the first place and the real problem lies elsewhere. Which brings us back to the central issue: Do you have any evidence that patents are actually causing problems in the real world, besides "patents exist, problems exist, one must be causing the other"?