> 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), th

> 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.