Expiry isn't the issue. In America (and Canada I'm pretty sure) you have the right to use a patent at a fair cost determined by a court. Or you can try to just use the patent anyway and wait for the court case to come to you.

Nope. A patent is an exclusive right yo an invention. They aren't forced to license it to you or anyone else.

There are a few exceptions in US law (e.g., provisions in the Defense Production Act) that can allow a patent owner to be compelled to license their IP. IANAL but I believe this generally requires an officially declared emergency of some kind.

There are additional exceptions short of a declared emergency, but rarely invoked. So in practice I agree this is unlikely to happen with e-ink displays. But for legal nerds I'll elaborate anyway.

Some exceptions are obviously inapplicable here, e.g. special rules for plant varieties [1] and nuclear energy [2]. The one most likely to apply to e-ink displays is that, under the Bayh-Dole act, if an invention was funded by government grants, and the patent holder fails to make it widely available, the government has so-called "march-in rights" to license it to third parties themselves. However this has never been successfully used. Wikipedia summarizes: "Though this right is, in theory, quite powerful, it has not proven so in terms of its practical application" [3].

[1] Perhaps because it's controversial to allow plant varieties to be patented in the first place, the statute for them has an explicit compulsory license clause (see the last subsection): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/7/chapter-57/subchap...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2183

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act#Petition...

Yeah, I initially threw in some caveats but removed them for brevity and because they don't really apply to the topic at hand (eink).

I mean, someone can also compel you to license your IP using a hammer.

The exception would be standard essential patents, as far as I know.

The standards bodies can encourage FRAND licensing, but there is no legal requirement backing it beyond the patent holder agreeing to it.

Thanks for the correction, I misremembered that, it seems. On the other hand, an SEP holder not licensing the patent with FRAND terms will have a hard time to establish any kind of standard, in some scenarios.

I agree with you, it would be counterproductive. The more common occurrance is that one of the patent-holding entities opts out of the FRAND agreement, holding all the implementors of the standard hostage. An example would be Forgent's acquisition of a patent they interpreted to be essential to JPEG. The patent was eventually invalidated in the courts, but it caused a lot of headaches for a few years in the early 2000s.

The patents on the original black and white displays have already expired. They are just really hard to make at large size without defects.

Newer versions that are easier to manufacture or have color are still under patents for a while.

They don't - the Display Electronic Slurry (DES) is a competing 'e-paper' tech that E-Ink corp haven't patented. It has slightly different pros and cons (it has a more defined checkerboard pattern which isn't as nicely grainy as E-Ink corp's MED, but it let's them pour the 'ink' straight into the substrate which potentially has higher contrast and resolution as a result), but ultimately that's irrelevant nitpicking if patents are causing the price of E-Ink screens to be crazily high as people keep falsely claiming. If DES could deliver screens at half the price, then Wiwood (?) would eat E-Ink's lunch.