5 ms·

Retro? Sure. Punk? Not when the patents are tightly held by a greedy patent troll who seems to do everything in their power to stop hobbyists and hackers

bloopernova 3y ago
Looks like some of the patents have expired, but the e-ink company keeps adding more. At least to my layman's eye the new patents don't seem to be particularly revolutionary :/
- terminous 3y ago
  > At least to my layman's eye the new patents don't seem to be particularly revolutionary It's the same trick that pharmaceutical companies use to extend their patents. Find a slightly new use or way that also covers the old use, and bam, exclusivity for another 20 years.
  - space_fountain 3y ago
    People say this but I’ve never been quite clear. Outside of medicine where you can convince doctors to insist on your new better safer cap or whatever is there anything stopping people from just building a product without the new patents. You still aren’t allowed to patent things with prior art right? So you can’t legally wait till your product is about to loose patent protection and then patent another existing aspect of it
    - couchand 3y ago
      Well the law on the matter really depends on the relative size of your legal team.
      - space_fountain 3y ago
        What does that look like exactly? Patenting something they’re already doing?
        couchand 3y ago
        Corporations with large legal teams are able to discourage others from experimenting in areas near expiring patents by coming up with "novel uses" and other such legal loopholes that effectively extend their patent protection despite what seem to be clear limits. This effect in the case of eInk is clearly described by others in this thread.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  Patents are irrelevant - if you think OLEDs don't have any patents then I have a bridge to sell you. The real problem is that E-Ink is a niche product that lacks economy of scale, because LCDs do everything an EPD can do and more. I don't know if it's been patented, but E-Ink's recent Gallery 3 screen is pretty amazing, they got multi-dye color screens to refresh fast enough to use in an e-note. That's insane, that's an order of magnitude reduction! It might actually make color e-notes a viable product category.
bee_rider 3y ago
Re-purposing them is retropunk
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Not when the patents are tightly held by a greedy patent troll who seems to do everything in their power to stop hobbyists and hackers That's a bit disingenuous and short-sighted view from people not knowing or understanding the industry, market, technology and manufacturing challenges. Sure, like any successful tech company, e-ink owns patents and controls a large part of the market more-or-less, but patents aren't the main reasons why the e-paper industry hasn't moved forward. That's kind of like saying "ASML's and Cymer's patents are the reason the EUV lithography hasn't moved forward and why they have no competition." No mate, that's not true. Just like EUV lithography, making e-ink tech displays, affordably, and at scale with good yields and healthy margins to keep the industry afloat, is hard, very hard, bordering on magic, which is the main reason they have no competition. Turns out making minuscule pigment electrostatic particles that can quicky move around inside a fluid suspension and hold their position long enough at various ambient conditions, is a huge challenge, and manufacturing that at scale with very low defects and sustainable margins is even harder. Nothing in their patents currently is holding back competition, but competition can't reach the scale and yields that would make enough profits to support a viable competitor consider even entering this field, versus OLED displays, as that's where thew real money is in display manufacturing right now and that's where the competition is heating up and where all the R&D money gets poured. That's why there's been various alternatives to e-ink-like tech popping up from university research labs and being displayed at trade shows, but going from a research lab one-off prototype being shown at trade shows, to mass production at scale with good yields and profit margins, is the real challenge and is where e-ink has their secret sauce that nobody can successfully replicate. Similarly how China has been showing off working home grown Xnm lithography prototype chips that can compete with TSMC, but reaching the yields and volumes of TSMC is where the impossible to cross cliff lies, and why people get confused and don't understand that the major challenge lies in manufacturing at scale and not just the core tech that makes the widget unique. I'm not defending e-ink the company and their corporate practices, just wanted to shed some light on the technicalities of the subject and hopefully clear some of the FUD and conspiracies that get wrongfully spread around.
- orhmeh09 3y ago
  > That's a bit disingenuous and short-sighted view from people not knowing or understanding the industry, market, technology and manufacturing challenges. For clarification -- disingenuous is defined as: > not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does In your post, are you claiming there's a shadowy group of people who at the same time are both unknowledgeable but also conspiring to hide their own knowledge?
weinzierl 3y ago
Commercialization is the fate of punk - always has been. I read the headline more in the sense of aesthetically Punk. I'm not sure if I agree, but E-Ink certainly has a very special appeal that always makes me want to buy more. Not so much the tablets, but the small displays, especially the brightly colored ones. The yellow background makes them look like sticky notes right out of a magic fairy tale wonder world.
adrianN 3y ago
A greedy patent troll is something that you’d expect in a cyberpunk story.
- prox 3y ago
  Yup Corpos are part of the equation.
joemi 3y ago
Does punk even exist if there's no "man" to "stick it to"?
- ynac 3y ago
  If only they asked questions like that in philosophy class! I'd say no, punk requires a wall to push against. The question of whether we still have a Man to stick it to - I'd say yes. And by Man, I mean a force that is either irresponsible with their power or got their power illegitimately or simply doing bad things with their power. Plenty of that around, and so much of it just goes ignored or worse, copied for personal gain. I'm just finishing up Schnier's - A Hacker's Mind - and it's a good example of where "hacking" happens these days. The force the book profiled hackers are working against are just the masses. Us. People. Which has always been around - but it makes me wonder if we as hackers of the 80s and 90s just developed a mental toolkit for corporations to use against us and then left our counterculture post empty.
- danjoredd 3y ago
  Hacking, the act of using technology in ways the manufacturer or developer didn't intend, is inherently punk. The "man" is the company that puts blocks in place to keep you from doing what you want with the hardware you bought.
criddell 3y ago
> a greedy patent troll who seems to do everything in their power to stop hobbyists and hackers Is there evidence of this? On every HN e-ink thread this is repeated as if it is common knowledge, but I haven't read much to back it up. Have you personally been shut down by lawyers when you try to use an eink display in a hacker kind-of-way? And yes, there are patents, but so what? How does the company wield them? Are the licensing terms terrible? My Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom CPU. Broadcom is no stranger to patents yet there's plenty of hobbyist and hacker activity around their components.
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
Sigh. Again with the story about "evil eInk and their gazillion patents". A story which : 1. Does not make any logistic sense: eInk is rather a small company versus the likes of Qualcomm, Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu, Philips, Microsoft (thanks to Wacom) all of which have way more patents in the EPD area that eInk. EPDs are literally as old as the _GUI_, and even started at the same place (Xerox). Plus, eInk relies mostly on chinese manufacture... which is well-known to generally don't give a damn. 2. Could not possibly have any motive: eInk apparently is a suicidal company that likes to torpedo its already shrinking little market so that .... what exactly? LCD manufacturers have a field day? 3. Ignores the fact that there are, indeed, multiple competitors to eInk whose panels are either indistinguishable from eInk or literally better. Many smartwatches like Pebble/Garmin don't use eInk _at all_, yet people even right here in HN still believe they are eInk. Qualcomm of all companies (an actual patent troll -- ask Apple -- and most definitely unlikely to be afraid of a minuscule company like eInk) owns a in my opinion _much_ better EPD technology called Mirasol which has zero of the slow refresh problems of eInk, much better color reproduction, much better contrast *, and is barely more expensive! The plain truth is that majority of customers just don't care enough about these technologies, and therefore they will always be niche. At the end of the day, average customer can't distinguish the latest EPD panel to a reflective LCD from decades ago. Customers will flock towards shiny glossy LCD watch over EPD all the time. That's why Gyricon failed. That's why Mirasol failed. That's why every other electrophoretic startup folds. * eInk contrast is still a joke and for the last decade actually degrading rather than improving, thanks to touchscreen layers, color filter layers, etc. But you see it being parroted all the time that "eink has infinite contrast". The latest color panels this year are no better than the ones I have on WindowsCE devices from the late 1990s, eInk or not. Colors still look incredibly dull, there is a ridiculously limited palette, and resolution and contrast take a sharp hit (pun not intended).
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Also: "punk" just means "aesthetic" now. The economic and political connotations have a long-term downtrend in mindshare.
  - jmbwell 3y ago
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
Retro-cyberpunk maybe?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bloopernova 3y ago

Looks like some of the patents have expired, but the e-ink company keeps adding more. At least to my layman's eye the new patents don't seem to be particularly revolutionary :/

terminous 3y ago
> At least to my layman's eye the new patents don't seem to be particularly revolutionary It's the same trick that pharmaceutical companies use to extend their patents. Find a slightly new use or way that also covers the old use, and bam, exclusivity for another 20 years.
- space_fountain 3y ago
  People say this but I’ve never been quite clear. Outside of medicine where you can convince doctors to insist on your new better safer cap or whatever is there anything stopping people from just building a product without the new patents. You still aren’t allowed to patent things with prior art right? So you can’t legally wait till your product is about to loose patent protection and then patent another existing aspect of it
  - couchand 3y ago
    Well the law on the matter really depends on the relative size of your legal team.
    - space_fountain 3y ago
      What does that look like exactly? Patenting something they’re already doing?
      - couchand 3y ago
        Corporations with large legal teams are able to discourage others from experimenting in areas near expiring patents by coming up with "novel uses" and other such legal loopholes that effectively extend their patent protection despite what seem to be clear limits. This effect in the case of eInk is clearly described by others in this thread.
Qwertious 3y ago
Patents are irrelevant - if you think OLEDs don't have any patents then I have a bridge to sell you. The real problem is that E-Ink is a niche product that lacks economy of scale, because LCDs do everything an EPD can do and more. I don't know if it's been patented, but E-Ink's recent Gallery 3 screen is pretty amazing, they got multi-dye color screens to refresh fast enough to use in an e-note. That's insane, that's an order of magnitude reduction! It might actually make color e-notes a viable product category.

bee_rider 3y ago

Re-purposing them is retropunk

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>Not when the patents are tightly held by a greedy patent troll who seems to do everything in their power to stop hobbyists and hackers That's a bit disingenuous and short-sighted view from people not knowing or understanding the industry, market, technology and manufacturing challenges. Sure, like any successful tech company, e-ink owns patents and controls a large part of the market more-or-less, but patents aren't the main reasons why the e-paper industry hasn't moved forward. That's kind of like saying "ASML's and Cymer's patents are the reason the EUV lithography hasn't moved forward and why they have no competition." No mate, that's not true. Just like EUV lithography, making e-ink tech displays, affordably, and at scale with good yields and healthy margins to keep the industry afloat, is hard, very hard, bordering on magic, which is the main reason they have no competition. Turns out making minuscule pigment electrostatic particles that can quicky move around inside a fluid suspension and hold their position long enough at various ambient conditions, is a huge challenge, and manufacturing that at scale with very low defects and sustainable margins is even harder. Nothing in their patents currently is holding back competition, but competition can't reach the scale and yields that would make enough profits to support a viable competitor consider even entering this field, versus OLED displays, as that's where thew real money is in display manufacturing right now and that's where the competition is heating up and where all the R&D money gets poured. That's why there's been various alternatives to e-ink-like tech popping up from university research labs and being displayed at trade shows, but going from a research lab one-off prototype being shown at trade shows, to mass production at scale with good yields and profit margins, is the real challenge and is where e-ink has their secret sauce that nobody can successfully replicate. Similarly how China has been showing off working home grown Xnm lithography prototype chips that can compete with TSMC, but reaching the yields and volumes of TSMC is where the impossible to cross cliff lies, and why people get confused and don't understand that the major challenge lies in manufacturing at scale and not just the core tech that makes the widget unique. I'm not defending e-ink the company and their corporate practices, just wanted to shed some light on the technicalities of the subject and hopefully clear some of the FUD and conspiracies that get wrongfully spread around.

orhmeh09 3y ago
> That's a bit disingenuous and short-sighted view from people not knowing or understanding the industry, market, technology and manufacturing challenges. For clarification -- disingenuous is defined as: > not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does In your post, are you claiming there's a shadowy group of people who at the same time are both unknowledgeable but also conspiring to hide their own knowledge?

weinzierl 3y ago

Commercialization is the fate of punk - always has been. I read the headline more in the sense of aesthetically Punk. I'm not sure if I agree, but E-Ink certainly has a very special appeal that always makes me want to buy more. Not so much the tablets, but the small displays, especially the brightly colored ones. The yellow background makes them look like sticky notes right out of a magic fairy tale wonder world.

adrianN 3y ago

A greedy patent troll is something that you’d expect in a cyberpunk story.

prox 3y ago
Yup Corpos are part of the equation.

joemi 3y ago

Does punk even exist if there's no "man" to "stick it to"?

ynac 3y ago
If only they asked questions like that in philosophy class! I'd say no, punk requires a wall to push against. The question of whether we still have a Man to stick it to - I'd say yes. And by Man, I mean a force that is either irresponsible with their power or got their power illegitimately or simply doing bad things with their power. Plenty of that around, and so much of it just goes ignored or worse, copied for personal gain. I'm just finishing up Schnier's - A Hacker's Mind - and it's a good example of where "hacking" happens these days. The force the book profiled hackers are working against are just the masses. Us. People. Which has always been around - but it makes me wonder if we as hackers of the 80s and 90s just developed a mental toolkit for corporations to use against us and then left our counterculture post empty.
danjoredd 3y ago
Hacking, the act of using technology in ways the manufacturer or developer didn't intend, is inherently punk. The "man" is the company that puts blocks in place to keep you from doing what you want with the hardware you bought.

criddell 3y ago

> a greedy patent troll who seems to do everything in their power to stop hobbyists and hackers Is there evidence of this? On every HN e-ink thread this is repeated as if it is common knowledge, but I haven't read much to back it up. Have you personally been shut down by lawyers when you try to use an eink display in a hacker kind-of-way? And yes, there are patents, but so what? How does the company wield them? Are the licensing terms terrible? My Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom CPU. Broadcom is no stranger to patents yet there's plenty of hobbyist and hacker activity around their components.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

Sigh. Again with the story about "evil eInk and their gazillion patents". A story which : 1. Does not make any logistic sense: eInk is rather a small company versus the likes of Qualcomm, Sony, Sharp, Fujitsu, Philips, Microsoft (thanks to Wacom) all of which have way more patents in the EPD area that eInk. EPDs are literally as old as the _GUI_, and even started at the same place (Xerox). Plus, eInk relies mostly on chinese manufacture... which is well-known to generally don't give a damn. 2. Could not possibly have any motive: eInk apparently is a suicidal company that likes to torpedo its already shrinking little market so that .... what exactly? LCD manufacturers have a field day? 3. Ignores the fact that there are, indeed, multiple competitors to eInk whose panels are either indistinguishable from eInk or literally better. Many smartwatches like Pebble/Garmin don't use eInk _at all_, yet people even right here in HN still believe they are eInk. Qualcomm of all companies (an actual patent troll -- ask Apple -- and most definitely unlikely to be afraid of a minuscule company like eInk) owns a in my opinion _much_ better EPD technology called Mirasol which has zero of the slow refresh problems of eInk, much better color reproduction, much better contrast *, and is barely more expensive! The plain truth is that majority of customers just don't care enough about these technologies, and therefore they will always be niche. At the end of the day, average customer can't distinguish the latest EPD panel to a reflective LCD from decades ago. Customers will flock towards shiny glossy LCD watch over EPD all the time. That's why Gyricon failed. That's why Mirasol failed. That's why every other electrophoretic startup folds. * eInk contrast is still a joke and for the last decade actually degrading rather than improving, thanks to touchscreen layers, color filter layers, etc. But you see it being parroted all the time that "eink has infinite contrast". The latest color panels this year are no better than the ones I have on WindowsCE devices from the late 1990s, eInk or not. Colors still look incredibly dull, there is a ridiculously limited palette, and resolution and contrast take a sharp hit (pun not intended).

jjoonathan 3y ago
Also: "punk" just means "aesthetic" now. The economic and political connotations have a long-term downtrend in mindshare.
- jmbwell 3y ago

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

Retro-cyberpunk maybe?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]