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> They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business. The

by derefr 5y ago

> They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business. They do seem to hold rather a lot of patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation), though I don't have the domain knowledge to know whether any of these are "unavoidable" in the domain in the way that e.g. software engineering process patents tend to be. Perhaps their competitors actually license some of them? Or are in a patent pooling arrangement? > It would be the equivalent of me believing that Google was strangling the market of innovation in search engines I mean, with the PageRank patent, they... sort of were? Nobody could come up with anything nearly as optimal as Google's approach for a long time, let alone more optimal; the next-best algorithms were way less good. And so we didn't see any real Google Search competitors — competitors competing on index quality against Google — after Google came into the market. (There's still nobody with a better raw index than Google's, AFAIK.) The original PageRank patent expired in 2015. A lot of advancement in the search space happened in 2015! Bing got a lot better, for one. Guess why? :) (Of course, companies that were somewhat immune to America's WIPO power — e.g. the government-backed conglomerates of China/Russia — have just been using PageRank or algorithms analogous to it in their web search services since the beginning. It was only the, er, NATO-member-country web-search-engine market that effectively stalled out.)

robinsoh 5y ago
> They do seem to hold rather a lot of patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation), though I don't have the domain knowledge to know whether any of these are "unavoidable" in the domain in the way that e.g. software engineering process patents tend to be. Some of those patents like the one about dual substrate TFT seem vaguely broad to me, but it doesn't even seem to be a display technology related patent to me. In fact it seems to be about microfluidics which is an abandoned area of research in display technology, at least in the commercial sense. As for "a lot of patents", just how many patents would you expect a company to have? How long has eInk been in business? 20 years? 30 years? I think I first heard of them in 2000s so at least 20 years it seems like. More importantly, why would we assume anything perverse is happening? My point is that HN commenters seemed to have a strong foundational belief (as shown by the original comment I responded to) that something perverse was happening. OP was effectively claiming that eInk would try to stop this electrochromic nanostructure display tech from succeeding, and now that I've challenged that claim, I don't see any OP or anyone else provide any sort of factual basis for it. So if you'll allow me, doesn't it kind of sound like a bunch of software guys shitting on a niche display company that failed to achieve their lofty desires? As a display guy, can I just say I have perhaps analogous despair at how terrible the software for everything I do on a daily basis is. I'm forced to reboot my desktop pretty much on a monthly basis. PLC controls that suck. Interfaces that are so horrible. Is that all Google's fault? Microsoft's fault? Is it all due to patent trolls? Who do I get to blame? You guys tell me please.

by derefr 5y ago

robinsoh 5y ago

> They do seem to hold rather a lot of patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation), though I don't have the domain knowledge to know whether any of these are "unavoidable" in the domain in the way that e.g. software engineering process patents tend to be. Some of those patents like the one about dual substrate TFT seem vaguely broad to me, but it doesn't even seem to be a display technology related patent to me. In fact it seems to be about microfluidics which is an abandoned area of research in display technology, at least in the commercial sense. As for "a lot of patents", just how many patents would you expect a company to have? How long has eInk been in business? 20 years? 30 years? I think I first heard of them in 2000s so at least 20 years it seems like. More importantly, why would we assume anything perverse is happening? My point is that HN commenters seemed to have a strong foundational belief (as shown by the original comment I responded to) that something perverse was happening. OP was effectively claiming that eInk would try to stop this electrochromic nanostructure display tech from succeeding, and now that I've challenged that claim, I don't see any OP or anyone else provide any sort of factual basis for it. So if you'll allow me, doesn't it kind of sound like a bunch of software guys shitting on a niche display company that failed to achieve their lofty desires? As a display guy, can I just say I have perhaps analogous despair at how terrible the software for everything I do on a daily basis is. I'm forced to reboot my desktop pretty much on a monthly basis. PLC controls that suck. Interfaces that are so horrible. Is that all Google's fault? Microsoft's fault? Is it all due to patent trolls? Who do I get to blame? You guys tell me please.