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SONICblue Granted Broad Patent on DVR Technology
hayb writes: "In another miscue from the U.S. Patent office, Sonicblue has received a patent for everything under the PVR sun. Now comes the question if they will go after others, or at least Tivo. To quote the first line of the patent: 'USPTO patent number 6,324,338 also covers methodology that creates, names, prioritizes and manages recorded programs on the hard drive for DVRs.'"
There are two things to note:
There is prior art for this stuff. Besides TiVo, people have tried to do this kind of technology before in the past; Java was spawned off of an 'embedded systems language' called Oak; which IIRC was built for things like PVRs, etc... but in the early 90s the public just wasn't ready for that kind of tech. Regardless, at the least TiVo was around before ReplayTV. Prior art is a powerful thing. Besides, SonicBlue has M$ To contend with as well, M$ having that UltimateTV thing (Which I strangely haven't seen/ heard ads for lately; i remember them blitzing the media early this summer.)
Additionally, as referenced in This Slashdot Article from earlier this year, TiVo was also recently granted a slew of patents on PVR Tech. I'm not sure which company got what tech patented however...
The first lines of patents tend to be broad, but not because the patents are broad, but rather because the first lines are introducing the field that the patent is in.
The first few claims are often the same way, giving definitions and context for claims built on them. Claims aren't supposed to be that way, but often they are anyhow. I was once told that a claim had to be a single sentence and could not contain the word "or". Makes things tricky.
This patent is not just about recording video onto hard disks. Most of the claims are dependent on a clause that says "a processor selecting future shows from a channel guide database for recording based on said user specified criteria, wherein the selection of shows is based on one of either pattern matching or fuzzy logic analysis of the user specified criteria and the channel guide database, and wherein the processor further selects for removal a previously recorded show having a lower priority than the selected future shows if insufficient capacity exists for recording the future shows;" This allows you the box to learn that you like SciFi and automatically record all the SciFi shows. Not hard, once you hear the idea, but I remember thinking that was a good idea when the product first came onto the market.
Other claims talk about automatically recording portions of a program that repeats. That way you always have the latest CNN sports news. I don't think anybody's product does this yet. (But it does seem kind of $illy to have two dependent claims that mention CNN.)
This patent is not just a software patent. Yes, some of it can be implemented using software, but not all of it. I don't know all the prior art, but this isn't completely obvious, and it's certainly not as fundamental to the industry as the press release implies.
It looks like this thing is practically patenting copying video to a hard drive... so couldn't not only Tivo, but also RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, tons of independant video players, etc. be used as examples of prior art if SonicBlue were to go after anyone with this?
I haven't analyzed the patent enough to see if it is really trying to patent "copying video to a hard drive," but I did not get that on my first impression.
However, TiVo came AFTER ReplayTV, and RealPlayer streams video, it doesn't save it. Windows Media Player plays/streams video, it's not in charge of saving video. And the last two don't even deal with TV programs.
I think the title of their PR sums up the patent: "Patent Covers Methodology for Recording and Storing TV Shows."
"And like that
The patent. This reads as if it's only the interface they're patenting IMHO.
Best line:
13. The method as recited by claim 10 wherein the default channel is CNN Headline News.
Actually I think their patent covers recording live TV to allow for "pausing" it. Sonic Blue's patent covers a method of encoding video to a set-top system for later playback. It's rather like patenting a VCR - yeah, people were using magnetic tape to record video but nobody had a device like a VCR.
I agree that patents have an extremely important roll in protecting some forms of innovation. Drugs companies, for instance, pour massive amounts of money into researching drugs. If they didn't have patent protection to prevent other companies from chemically cloning their work and issuing a generic drug, they wouldn't do the research.
Patents serve another important purpose as well--they encourage companies to _publish_ their techinical innovations, rather than keeping them as trade secrets. This allows people to build on the ideas in the patents, even if they may have to pay royalties. Also, patents to have limited duration--eventually the work reverts to the public domain. The secret of making half-silvered mirrors was jealously guarded in Europe for years, retarding the development of optics.
However, not all fields need patent protection. Buisiness Innovations, for instance, are one of the stupidest things patentable under todays system. A company derives benefits from using a buisiness innovation first, regardless of how many other people copy it.
I am also of the opinion that software does not need to be patented. Copyright protection protects the specific implemenation from being stolen. The patentability of mathematical algoritms protects many other research intensive software projects. Most other software patents seem to be "using computers and software to do X." Maybe software patents could be fixed by a more strict application of the principle "nothing is patentable that is obvious to a practitioner of the art," but unless you can come up with some good examples of software innovation that wouldn't have occured without patent protection, I'll still favor eliminating them.
It's the claims which count, not what the marketing folks say.
Claim 1 requires a channel guide database, user criteria, that the processor use pattern matching or fuzzy logic, and an interesting kicker -- the processor also "further selects for removal a previously recorded show having a lower priority than the selected future shows if insufficient capacity exists for recording the future shows..."
Most of the independent claims (1, 19,30,36,42,48,49,50) have this limitation, namely the leabillity to automatically remove old recorded shows.
If you don't have this limitation, it seems to me you've avoided those claims.
On the other hand, I don't know what Claim 26 means!
namaste-