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

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"

[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

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.