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

ATI All In Wonder

[GigsVT]

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?

Not a patent on "Pausing"

[Mwongozi]

Come on Hemos, this isn't a patent on pausing. It's a patent on the concept of freezing a live feed and buffering the incoming picture, and then continuing to play a time-delayed picture.

Worthy of a patent, methinks.

Re:Not a patent on "Pausing"

[rfsayre]

Worthy of a patent, methinks

I can't imagine that this type of technology didn't exist in newsrooms and other parts of tv networks prior to 1992.

Re:Not a patent on "Pausing"

[TheCarp]

Excuse me?

Patents were designed so that you could come up with an idea, sit around with yout thumb up your ass for years until someone else comes up with the idea and actually DOES something with it, then sue them for money?

Funny, and I thought patents were designed to give inventors a limited monopoly to encourage them to publish ideas, rather than keeping them as trade secrets. So you could make money selling your own product, or licensing it to someone who can.

-Steve

They can't have invented this....

[mblase]

A broadcast recording and playback device employing a "circular buffer" which constantly records one or more incoming audio or video program signals and a microprocessor for accessing the memory to read a playback signal from the circular buffer to display programming material delayed from its receipt by a selectable delay interval. The circular buffer is implemented by a digital memory.

Doesn't that describe a very common and straightforward buffer, such as the kind that have been employed in portable CD players for years now?

Re:They can't have invented this....

[GigsVT]

Yeah it's a normal FIFO buffer. Have you ever read the patent database over at IBM? There are so many hundreds of patents that overlap each other it's not funny.

But did Tivo *know* about Pause's patent

[jswitte]

I agree with the argument that an obvious idea at time x may not have been obvious at time x-10, so was worthy of a patent then. But AFAIK, Tivo didn't use Pause Technologie's implementation of the "compressed-video-FIFO" of whatever they called it. Tivo reinvented the same idea again, probably without knowing about Pause's patent (this alone makes it sound like a submarine patent). IMO, independent invention, if not being totally illegal.

The idea of patents is to reward people (for a limited period of time) for the work of creating useful inventions/ideas by being able to charge people money to use them. If I come up with a nify way to make a magnet out of cerium and boron somehow (not magnetic AFAIK, but if it is, I get first dibs ;-), I should be allowed to patent it and sell that implementation. If someone else comes up with the same idea, and it turns out they stole it from me (trade secret for instance), I should be able to sue them. But if they work for 10 years and come up with the same formula, without ever knowing that I had, I shouldn't be able to ay anything.

Of course, pantents are public record (at least some parts of them are), so it could be very difficult to prove that Tivo "had no knowledge of Pause's patent" prior to coming up with the Tivo machine. This would always be a problem with patents, more so when the idea is a 'simple one' ("gee, I was browsing the patent database one day and saw this one about pausing live tv. I didn't look at it, but that could make a lot of money" Does that constitute "knowledge of the patent? I don't know)

RealPlayer

[Puk]

According to the RealNetworks web page, they've been around since 1995. They have been buffering incoming video while letting you play, pause, rewind, fast forward, and jump to live for quite a while. Doing the same to TV doesn't seem to be all that different. Is RealNetworks paying royalties to some company with a patent on it?

God knows how long their predecessors in streaming video (possibly in research) have been doing similar things. Does anyone have any related info?

People have been buffering streamed data forever. It's hard to believe (though not impossible) that no one ever paused that stream while still recording before 1992. If they did, this is just a logical extension, and probably not patentable.

Of course, I'm sure their patent lawyers realize this and did their research and either concluded that 1) no one had done it before or 2) no one would sue them. :)

-Puk

Aside from you having no credibility...

[Giant Hairy Spider]

...you're both missing the point and making a ridiculous challenge. I don't believe for a second that you'd go through with this even if you really were a patent lawyer.

First off, there's a lot of space between "annoyed at a stupid patent" and "willing to spend $2520 (plus God knows what) to get just this particular patent struck down."

Secondly, there's a huge gap between truth and a court finding. The fact that an invention is stupidly obvious to any professional in the field is no guarantee (or even a good indicator) that the technologically incompetent courts will find this to be true. You yourself call for "prior art," which has nothing at all to do with obviousness. Prior art would invalidate the patent whether it was obvious or not. The most obvious things are never said, because it's a waste of breath and an insult to the intelligence of the audience. This is especially true of trivial applications of an emerging technology, such as using a hard drive to buffer incoming video until the user wanted to view it.

Finally, fighting these cases one at a time is the wrong way to go, there are thousands and thousands of patents that shouldn't exist, only symptoms of a deeper problem. The proper solution is a change in policy.

How can we do that? By whipping up public opposition. In short, by complaining about the worst abuses continually, and blaming the patent office and the laws which allow them to occur. When a fair portion of the general population understands the cost of an incompetent patent office there will be irresistable political pressure to change it.

Fighting within the system is for those who have their own urgent stake in the matter. The rest of us are far better off doing what we can to change it.