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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.
Please post all "I think I'm going to patent [insert obvious commonly used everyday thing here]! hehehe! Aren't I clever!" type posts under this thread so they they can be summarily ignored.
How many of us saw the Tivo pause function and said "Hey! That's a great idea!" because we had never thought of it? In 92 pausing live TV was probably novel and non-obvious.
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People on slashdot have a tendency to speak badly of technology patents, and for the most part I agree, but this one seems valid. Look at when it was filed. 1992. Very very few people were even thinking about the idea of pausing live TV back then. Just because it is a simple idea (especially now) does not mean the patent isn't valid when it was filed for. That's the nature of technology. You could make a case of "patent squatting" since the company doesn't appear to have done anything with the patent, but that's a whole other can of worms.
The company could be an "idea" company like Rambus, which I can't really say I like the idea of, but they've been around for a long time. I guess they add value somewhere.
Khyron
Excuse me, please explain how it is different from a tape delay used by censors prior to the introduction of digital systems. The tape is a memory buffer, you can place heads at different locations along the tape stream to get live and delayed feeds. It just looks obvious to me and I'm not unusually skilled in the art of video systems.
"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.
Now, I don't know for sure, but I believe that the ATI method does use "a combination of semiconductor RAM and disk memory".
THe length of time you can pause it is limited by the hard disk you tell it to use... so I know it is writing out to disk, and i'm sure that it is buffering it in RAM before writing it, so I think it's exactly what the patent says.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
It looks to me that this company was founded after TiVo and Replay were already products. They must have bought a patent from someone so they could try to exploit other companies that actually did something with the technology. IMNSHO, patents should be a bit more like trademarks, in that you have to use the technology or you lose it.
Pausing. Obviously, a new idea, and one worthy of patenting. I think I'm going to patent the play button.
I take offense to that comment. I realize that this is the normal attitude here on Slashdot and it's really warranted most of the time, especially dealing with companies like Microsoft, etc. However this technology is rather complicated and innovative and will actually improve the TV watching experience, especially for those sports lovers out there. There's a lot more than just a "pause" button that goes into this.
~ now you know
Interesting... We're talking about one of the best minds of the 20th century (/sarcasm)
more patents by the same guy
my favorites:
Apparatus for testing lumber stiffness
(how to check the stiffness of wood. wierd trend he set here)
System for using a touchpad input device for cursor control and keyboard emulation
(it's called repatenting the touchpad)
Audio message exchange system
(you know how old answering machines use a looping cassette? well yeah, that in computer form)
Billing system and method
(*any* ebilling system would infringe on this patent)
Techniques for changing the behavior of a link in a hypertext document
(any dynamic page violates this patent)
If God gave us curiosity
How long has radio time delay been used? You know the ones that allow them to censor the callers who swear on the air before it gets sent out on the airwaves? This sounds a bit similar... I wonder if it is pre-1992?
Of course this thread will degenerate into rants along the lines of "I will patent breathing", but despite the snide remark, back in 1992, pausing LIVE TV was definitely an original idea. Remember, digital VCRs didn't exist back then. Video capture cards were hideously expensive and reserved for professional video editors. At that time, the idea that you could pause live TV and then start playing it again while it was still recording was unheard of.
There was a time when filing a patent alone was not enough to protect an invention. The original intention of patent law was to encourage to spread of knowledge and advancement of technology in a fledgling nation. Paten protection arose to protect innovators who would otherwise be tempted to keep IP secret rather than to expose it and risk its theft. Why not then bring back the requirement, as it used to be, that the idea has to be implemented in a commerically viable way or declare the patent protection period over? The reason this requirement was lost was that large corproations like ot patent squat to stifle innovation by small firms: if you file enough defensive patents around your products, and have a big company's legal resoruces, you can bully and bar small companies from competition with you. So much for entrepreneurship. A lot of innovation is being squelched by these patent squatters who file a broad patent and then wait for someone else to make something similar and commercially viable in order to pounce. This is not in keeping with the spirit and intention of patent law. Sure the concept was patentable by Pause but TiVo made it work and so should have been able to wrest the patent from Pause after a period of say 5 years if Pause did not capitalize on it. Otherwise innovation gets locked away to noone's (except ligitgators) benefit. That's not what the founders of this country appear to have intended.
This completely fails the obviousness test.
Patents are to protect mechanism not functionality. Once you decide you want the functionality of pausing a live broadcast, any halfway bright techie could give you a dozen different buffering methods (buffer on tape loop, buffer on disk, buffer on drum, buffer in RAM, etc.). All of these mechanisms are obvious, because they would be generated in a short brainstorming session with a small random selection of video engineers (i.e. people with ordinary skill in the relevant art), and would likely be generated by any one randomly selected video engineer.
It's very important that the functionality is not patentable, because the function is exposed in marketing, while the mechanism might be kept secret, and the main purpose of patents is to encourage publishing of what would be trade secrets.
This is the worst kind of idiotic patent: very vague on mechanism, later used to attack anyone implementing the same functionality. Just like those jerks who tried to sue everyone using FMV in games because they had a patent on a playback-on-demand system (never mind that they specified a completely unrelated mechanism).
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You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
But it's not really a patent on a specific hardware implementation of the idea. It's a patent on the idea. Which is just too vague. The idea I have of patents is that they provide protection for implementations, not ideas (just like copyright protects actual works, not classes of works). I'd get into the "or otherwise you could patent stuff like..." debates, since it's obvious the USPTO no longer knows or cares what it is granting patent status on. Or they are specifically interested in making sure that business continue to pay the exorbitant patent fees for any and every idea that a business can reasonably describe in a patent application, whether or not the business actually implements those ideas.
I do not have a signature
Tivo never actually plays live TV. It only plays recordings. Tivo is constanly recording the incoming video stream. The interface that you have is just a playback of recorded programs, including the current "live buffer". However, you can never actually watch live tv, the closest you can get is a ~2 second delay. Everything you see is coming directly off the harddrive... Maybe this is enough of a difference to not be infringing?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
This particular patent is apparently not terribly vague on mechanism. So it's only the second worst kind: patenting a totally obvious approach while it's too expensive to implement, so you can go and pester everyone when it becomes feasible.
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You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
It doesn't matter if you independently come up with the idea, or if you use someone elses patent as a source of information. Either way, you are infringing on their patent.
You might be right about lawsuits though... I don't think you can sue for infringement if the other party was not aware you had a patent. EVen worse, if the patent holder knew about it and didnt' say anything. I think you can only sue for damages if you tell them about your patent and they ignore it.
What the patent is actually on is a market niche and a gamble: someone paid several thousand dollars betting that this market niche would become lucrative enough within the lifetime of the patent to recoup the cost. It's like a big gambling parlor.