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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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.