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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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
>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)
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
AbstractI 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.