Earlier quoted context omitted.
They literally couldn’t get rich if they kept it out of everybody else’s hands.
Sure they could? That's a common way people get rich off of patents; make a product which uses your new innovation, sell that product, use the patent to prevent everyone else from using the innovation to make competing products. I believe that's more or less the history of e-ink, among other things.
> the history of e-ink
Could you give everyone here some verifiable data? Please identify what patent you're talking about. I hope I will get a genuine response from someone who genuinely knows that industry because the last time I asked I just got a patents.google.com/search?q=eink response. It is fun to blame patents. But that's like saying we're not making progress in operating systems because Microsoft owns a key patent in operating systems.