TiVo Infringes On Pause Patent

Blackwulf writes: "It seems that there's a company named Pause Technologies which patented in 1992 the ability to pause live TV, play a portion of it, and then skip ahead to live TV. They are now suing TiVo for infringing on their patent. Motorola has already paid licensing fees for their upcoming PVR, and Pause Technologies is speaking with other PVR makers offering licenses to them as well. Yahoo has the story here." Pausing. Obviously, a new idea, and one worthy of patenting. I think I'm going to patent the play button.

Comments

link to patent

[jamus]

Here's a link to patent in question (RES36801) from the US Patent and Trademark Office. The link was pulled off the pause technology website.

Re:ATI All In Wonder

[rsborg]

Does this mean that ATI is also infringing on the patent since their All In Wonder cards come with software that allows you to pause live TV?

Perhaps not... the patent makes very direct references to the use of a "circular buffer" using "digital memory"... specifically,

"Subsystem comprising the combination of a semiconductor RAM memory and a disk memory operated under the control of a microprocessor such..."

Since the All-in-Wonder does not use disk memory, I doubt they could be targetted by this patent.

Go to the company's website...

[Cinnamon]

This looks suspicious to say the least. Go to their site, apparently as a company Pause Technologies does... Well, nothing, except has this one patent. They have maybe six total pages on their whole site, and none of them reference anything concrete beyond this one patent. My guess is this company is just a facade (Note the 'llc' instead of 'inc', this is usually a pretty clear sign) for an individual or law firm that decided they wanted to make a quick buck.

Not to say they didn't patent it, but they're trying to pass themselves off as a technology company. Much more likely some asshole with dollar signs in his eyes was looking at a vcr remote one day and thought, "Eureka!" The rest is history.

I think this says it all about Pause Technology...

[AX.25]

>Pause Technology is an intellectual property company focused on the Personal Video Recorder market and related industries. In addition to licensing our existing patents we are interested in acquiring new ones as well. Please direct any representations of new technologies to Charlie Call .

Pause Technology, founded in 2000, is an LLC that has been well funded by major corporate and individual shareholders.

There use of technology is the only technology in the whole company. Does it make sense that a company founded in 2000 can buy old "unexploited" patients and sue innovative companies? Bad lawyers...bad...bad.

Re:Why did they wait so long?

[Washizu]

>Why did they wait so long to file the lawsuit

I wondered the same thing, but after reading the article it says (bold face put in by me):

"The infringed patent, U.S. Patent RE 36,801 (http://www.pausetechnology.com/patent.html), the ``Pause Patent,'' was originally filed in 1992 and issued in 1995. In 1996, a re-examination was requested, and on August 1, 2000 the patent was reissued by the Patent Office with the same filing date and additional claim coverage.

TiVo was notified on April 4th, 2000 and again on May 23, 2001 that it was infringing on the patent and an offer to discuss licensing terms was extended."

So they didn't exactly sit on it for 9 years and then all of a sudden slam TiVo with a lawsuit. I think TiVo's going to have to cough up the fees.

TiVo's patent application: July 27, 1999

[mblase]

Patent #5,930,444

Simultaneous recording and playback apparatus

Abstract

A keyboard equipped audiovisial recording and playback device is provided having an input and an output adapted for connection between a users signal source and display device, respectively, and a memory unit with a storage medium enabling random access to programming information stored therein. A keyboard responsive control circuit enables manipulation and transfer of programming information between the input, output and memory. Because of the relative high speed of the control circuitry and memory access, substantially simultaneous recording and playback of television type signals is achieved, thus enabling user controlled programming delay.

Looks like Tivo already handled it

[latneM]

If you look at A Tivo Patent (6,233,389) they discuss prior art.

The use of digital computer systems to solve this problem has been suggested. U.S. Pat. No. 5,371,551 issued to Logan et al., on Dec. 6, 1994, teaches a method for concurrent video recording and playback. It presents a microprocessor controlled broadcast and playback device. Said device compresses and stores video data onto a hard disk. However, this approach is difficult to implement because the processor requirements for keeping up with the high video rates makes the device expensive and problematic. The microprocessor must be extremely fast to keep up with the incoming and outgoing video data.

It would be advantageous to provide a multimedia time warping system that gives the user the ability to simultaneously record and play back TV broadcast programs. It would further be advantageous to provide a multimedia time warping system that utilizes an approach that decouples the microprocessor from the high video data rates, thereby reducing the microprocessor and system requirements which are at a premium.

Just for reference, U.S. Pat. No. 5,371,551 is the Pause Technology Patent. So not only was Tivo aware of this patent, they talk about the shortcomings and why their way is better.
As an aside, it looks like if the Tivo is infringing on the patent, it's only the stand alone unit. Their DirecTV receivers with Tivo do no compression.

Re:Not a patent on "Pausing"

[jeff-wb8wka]

It did. I and another fellow (w8kox) wrote a commodore 64 program to do 30 minute tape delays of Piston basketball games back in 1986 at the local UHF station (WKBD). Used 3 one inch tape machines all controlled via the commodore par port.