Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Worthy of a patent, methinks.
Hey, I remember using this patent back when I was a kid, looooong before this "Pause Technologies" patented the idea.
It was called blinking.
Pretty simple technology, really: (A) Look at scene. (B) Close eyes. Brain continues to recall scene, effectively pausing the action. (C) Open eyes. Live action playback is resumed.
Ah, if only I'd known that this was such an innovative idea, I'd have patented it back in '72. Coulda been a billionaire by now -- those VCRs wouldn't be nearly as useful without frame-by-frame playback!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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.
"Pausing. Obviously, a new idea, and one worthy of patenting. I think I'm going to patent the play button. "
The patent was on puasing a LIVE TV stream. That would involve buffering on some end to keep the stuff that normally would get lost in a live one way feed like most tv signals.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
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?
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.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
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
Looks like I'll have to see who capitualtes and who doesn't when I shop for a PVR. Seems I won't be buying a Motorola model.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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.
-- If we were in any other industry they would've shot us a long time ago.
can be found here
Wow... reminds me of the Aussie guy who patented the wheel...
(This comment did not pass the lameness filter)
If God gave us curiosity
Unfortunately, TiVo is not doing any better than anyone else right now (capital-wise) and cannot afford to throw any change at these monkeys. I am a lifetime subscriber, and would HATE it if TiVo disappeared as a result of a lame-ass patent lawsuit such as this.
This better not be a nail in their coffin...
Jethro
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
This is like those idiot cybersquatters. These morons patent a concept, do jack shit to develop it, then get mad when someone else does. There should be a clause in US Patent law that requires you to actually implement your ideas. Otherwise people just sit on it until someone else makes it work, then reap huge financial rewards for being the first to buy the piece of paper.
One wonders why they didn't do something a couple of years ago when Tivo first started selling these boxes...
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
>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.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
I therefore suggest that the US 5th Cavalry and the Tie Fighters attack from the south, and turn Pause into the kind of rubble Afghanistan already is.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's all in how the patent's worded, of course. If the patent is too broad, then it'll get killed by prior art. If it's too narrow, TiVO will get off scott free. However, the fact that Motorola licensed the technology indicates there may actually be some merit to this patent debate. There's also the fact that Pause tried to talk to TiVO about it before taking it to court.
/insert basic idea here/ and make a money" may be inappropriate. It really all depends on the wording in the patent. If they really did get a good patent on the idea, then they should be allowed to defend it. The idea of pausing live TV is still pretty innovative, and thus if the technology is described with no vague BS, then the patent dispute is valid.
It's highly likely this is a legitimate complaint, so remarks like "oh I think I'll go patent
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
...back in 1992, the computer technology was nowhere NEAR advanced enough to allow for pausing of live TV using a PVR. The memory and disk space requirements would have been functionally impossible. So this patent, while describing a neat idea, was functionally useless until about 2-3 years ago.
While that doesn't invalidate the patent in and of itself, it does make me wonder what the "inventor" intended to do with this idea. How can you invent something that can't be built?
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.
I wondered the same thing, but after reading the article it says (bold face put in by me):
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.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
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
Simultaneous recording and playback apparatus
AbstractGive me a break. It's just using a buffer to store a datastream until a later point in time. If this is a patent infringement, then half the software out there is a patent infringment. Good god, what's next, patenting the concept of a variable?
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?
Ok maybe Tivo should have done a little research to see if anyone has any outstanding patents (it seems Motorola did (research)), but patenting the pause button is a little silly. Ok, I can perfectly understand the fact that this company is suing Tivo for use of a practice (I don't even consider this technology) that they own without appropriate royalties, etc. However what I don't understand is how the govt can possibly justify giving somebody a patent on something mundane as pausing television. If it was the technology of pausing television then yes (all the hardwork went into developing that technology). But for the concept? What if someone had patented the idea of a button on an html page. (Bare with me here). Its not all that different, neither were implemented technology. Would the world wide web consortium have violated that patent when they decided on html? I know the comparison is kind of rediculous, but isn't the idea of patenting a concept alittle rediculous too? In a perfect world/democracy an idea should be open, with technique being patenable. That seems to be the best way of conserving competitiveness while protecting accomplishment.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
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.
What does "reissued" mean on their patent? Does this patent bite the dust in 2009 or 2017?
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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.
;-), 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.
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
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)
"It's a patent on the concept of freezing a live feed and buffering the incoming picture"
Isn't that "pausing" live T.V.?
This is a type of pausing, so, you're wrong...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
It's a really, really, really, really simple, obvious, non-novel concept. Actually, before I even knew what a fucking Tivo did, I started working on a Linux box to do this.
I guess I'm just a freaking genius then, since this is supposedly such a novel concept. I should have patented this 10 years ago when I was 13... right...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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.
The AIWs do this too, just no mention.
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
...including this one from 1999. It looks remarkably similar to the one that Pause Technology is trying to concoct, except more thorough and clearly with a physical implementation in mind.
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 wasn't that new of an idea, even in 1992. I remember an "I Dream of Jeannie" episode where, at the end of the episode, Jeannie wants to go out and do something, and the dude that Larry Hagman played wanted to watch a very important football game. Jeanne blinked, paused the TV, and presumebly, when they got back Jeannie blinked again, and the game continued.
So the idea of pausing live TV has been around since at least September 1970 (When the last original episode of Jeannie aired), and probably around alot longer then that.
But you can't be sued for infringement unless you knowingly infringe.
If you didn't know there was a patent, and the patent holder didn't tell you, they can't sue you for damages, no?
I thought they could only go for damages after they inform you of the patent and you ignore them.
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.
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.
I think a lot of what people object to in patents like this is that they basically just use obvious and commonly known methods to translate old analog inventions to digital "inventions".
Yeah, there's a small spark of "genius" in being the first to realize digital has advanced far enough to emulate a particular analog device - or at least in thinking of patenting it - but even that is VERY heavily trod ground.
There ought to be a principle established that no patent is granted on inventions that are simply translated from one fundamental technology to another. Once we work out common design principles for quantum technology, let's NOT have a "quantum pause" patent...
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.
Gotuit Video, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gotuit Media, Corp. Both companies were founded by Logan, who is also the founder of MicroTouch Systems, Inc. (MTSI) a $160 million manufacturer of touch screen systems. He was a board member of Andover.Net, parent company of famed tech community Slashdot and a leader in the Open Source movement, which was recently sold to VA Linux.
Gotuit's prominent board of advisors includes Harvard Law School Professor Terry Fisher, a leading authority on Internet and copyright law; Joel Harrison, cofounder of the Quantum Corporation; Mark Pascarella, EVP of The Topol Group LLC; Brian Zisk, cofounder of the Future of Music Coalition and Green Witch Internet Radio; and Kevin Liga, CTO of interactive TV company, ACTV.
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
I still say it's a bad idea to allow a patent on just an idea without a 'reference implementation. That would stop these people from patenting ideas and just laying in wait until someone implements your patent, and then you can jump on them.
If there's not a working implementation of your idea with 12 months, the patent is invalid.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
This is what buffers and FIFO's are for... to allow transfer of data between two asychronous streams; specifically, when either the consumer or the producer has large amounts of jitter (hint: think PAUSE). All such buffers are circular, because making an infinite size FIFO is impossible. Hence: this patent IS obvious AND has prior art. Just because you think it is clever doesn't mean a damn thing.
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
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Patents are supposed to cover non-obvious technologies. This patent is incredibly obvious, and trivial. Even worse, it was obvious back in '92 when it was patented.
The reason TiVo didn't see the patent was likely because it was submarined... they kept it 'pending' for years, so that it would be issued publicly just before that wanted to enforce it.
TiVo patented their own method of doing this in '99, and that wouldn't have been granted if the '92 patent was available for them to see.
Face it, patents are usually crap and this is a perfect example of it. You corporate apologists have your work cut out for you here.
Hey Telek, do a little more research before posting. Did you ever think there might be more than one "James Logan" in the USA? Those 17 patents that you found were from at least four different people living in MA, NH, WA, and CO during the 1990's.
Check the facts!
Every time I see one of these patents that obvious, I get the urge to try to submit a patent for "An error resitant approach to online shopping - Multi-click". The idea behind the patent would be to extend the Amazon one-click patent to require clicking more than once to buy something to avoid getting orders by mistake. As I understand Patent law it is ok to build on another patent it just means that if I sell the rights I for mine I have to get rights to the base patent first. In any case Amazon would own one-click but I would own all of the rest of the online shopping scene.
Then I wake up to reality and go back to work.. It is fun to dream though.
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
...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.
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You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
You have no idea of the irony in using a "frame sync" as an arguement in a patent discussion.
Many lawyers made lots of money over that one.
Is there really *anybody* who *didn't* want to do this with their vcr (or, for t
hat matter, didn't *try* it, having failed to think things through [namely that
it stopped recording while you played {Not that *I* ever made that mistake}]).
For that matter, the prior art is ancient. It's called "Instant Replay," and wa
s used widely by the American Broadcasting Company for an obscure program called
"Monday Night Football". They used a new device from the computer industry cal
led a "hard drive", onto which they recorded the last several seconds of the vid
eo signal rather than the usual "digital" storage used on such machines.
hawk
Really, if you look at the patent system as a way of guaranteeing lawyers income, it actually makes sense! After all, who made those laws? Lawyers!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
First, I'd like to shoot anybody who claims you cannot patent an idea. The american Patent office seems to do a good job of issuing patents for ideas.
When a mechanism, a process and an implementation of a way for an end user to perform the action specified in the idea is SO BLOODY OBVIOUS TO ANYBODY in the industry there is ngeligable difference between patenting an idea, or a mechanism/process/implementation.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story back in the fifties or sixties about how back in the thirties or forties he came up with the idea of geosynchronous orbit communication satellites but since neither the satellites nor the rockets sophisticated and powerful enough to deliver them to orbit existed at the time, his application was denied, and by the time the technology existed he was out of luck because by that time the idea was considered "obvious".
Slightly offtopic, but around the same time he wrote another (supposedly fictional) short story entitled "I Remember Babylon" about a Chinese Communist plan to have their own version of Telstar which would beam regular VHF or UHF television signals down to North America with programming designed to influence us into becoming a weak and degenerate society. A lot of the programming he described then sounds a lot like a lot of what is being shown now. Well worth reading if you run across it somewhere. (I think it's in "The Nine Billion Names of God" anthology.)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If Volvo hadn't patented it, some other company (with the help of industrial espionage) would have before Volvo actually started production (so that they couldn't prove prior art) and then Volvo would have had to pay some other company royalties in order to use their own idea.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
if pause is so key on their special little idea, why the hell did it take them this long to see that a major player in this field "stole their idea"?
smells too much like the case of unisys' claim on lzw encoding. there outta be a law against waiting (in hiding) while something gets real successful - grabbing a hold on the market - then coming out of hiding and claiming credit for some blatantly obvious idea.
isn't there a statute of limitations? if pause wants to make a living in this field, shouldn't they have been one of the first to realize that their idea was being 'stolen'? isn't sitting by and doing nothing sort of admitting that your idea wasn't really yours, exclusively?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
They used to require working prototypes with submission but eventually were unable to manage all the inventions, thereby dropping the requirement
The Patent King, Jerome Lemelson, made fortunes off that. He had hundreds of patents and he kept them active for decades by make updates to them which 'resets' the clock on the patent expiration. In the 50's he patented "hooking up a video camera to a computer" and one of his last acts before he died was to bring suit against anyone selling laser-barcode readers as infringing on that patent. The USPTO actually changed a number of their regulations just to keep people like him from being able to do so much damage.
The wierd thing is that doing a search on him on Google yields a surprising number of "Jerome Lemelson, a tribute to American ingenuity", which is actually pretty accurate, just not the way they think. He spent the better part of his life making Rambus look like amateurs.
Dyolf Knip
really? Ever heard of "instant replay"? ABC used a modified hard disk in the '70s to do this on Monday Night football--they just recorded analog instead of digital.
hawk
So, a friend of mine did this as an EE project at Berkeley in 1990 (it used ram only to store the feed, and had a limit of 10-15 seconds I think, just enough for a, "oh, what was that," replay).