I'm trying to understand what you're trying to communicate but I don't get it. Could you elaborate what you're trying to say because it sounds like you're claiming patents are bad (absence of patents = innovation growth) but we know that patents arose initially at least to protect inventors. Anyway we've gone well outside my initial question which was about which eink patent.
hm, didn't see this.
Yeah, I do believe that patents tend to undermine innovation pretty much everywhere, and yes, I do acknowledge that that was not the intent. The intent was to grant a temporary monopoly on an invention, to give an inventor time to 'cash-in'. Unfortunately that means it's effectively 'closed-source': no one else can make improvements to it w/o permission, and so I think a lot of innovation happens when a patent lapses. If that hasn't happened with e-ink displays, cool, then I must've misread something. It's hard to imagine e-ink displays being patent-free however.
