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
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.
