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SONICblue Sues TiVo for Patent Infringement
SVDave writes "Yesterday, Slashdot reported that SONICblue was going to start negotiating patent licensing with TiVo. It appears that SONICblue has switched strategies: today they've decided to sue TiVo for patent infringement. Given TiVo's patents on PVR technology, I would expect a quick countersuit, though SONICblue claims that ReplayTV does not infringe on any of TiVo's patents."
And the sound of lawyers laughter echos throughout the land.
In a time of universal lies, Telling the Truth is a revolutionary act - George Orwell
So basically, competition is pretty much grounds for a lawsuit these days. Nice.
SIGFEH
Hrm... lets see, I have an anologue Hauppauge controller, PC, and DivX encoder and Hauppauge DVB-s card that can pipe the MPEG2 transport stream to disk, the software to tie it all together, will they be suing me next?
Let's face it, it's just rudimentary off the shelf hardware put in a different box, if someone decides to make a PC that looks like a funky box will be get sued too? Based on the hardware the patent seems unsubstantiated, looking at the software it looks unsubstantiated, I bet TiVO even use the Video For Linux API.
They just seem to be uping the ante here by filing a lawsuit. It's a fairly common tactic to use durring/preceding negotiations for companies to get the upper hand in negotiations. We all know that if you sue someone they're guilty, right?
These companies should save their energy, and possibly share resources for the real battle they have yet to face, which is against the networks.
This technology has the potential of becoming as significant and controversial as Napster...
Unfortunately, with all these patents flying around for very basic methods of PVR operation, it really makes creating an open source PVR project an absolute MINEFIELD. Heck, it almost seems like a strategy that is worthy of Microsoft. (Hey! Why isn't anyone suing THEM?)
PVRs are going to become more and more important years down the road. And they're going to mix (or are mixing) with VOD functionality. And Microsoft looks like it wants to make the PVR part of a television/home entertainment hub.
But how the heck can a serious open source PVR project be started in this minefield of a legal environment?
Reflect on this though, and try and keep it in mind when we as a collective group bitch and moan so loudly about software patents.
Typically, at the date a patent is applied for, most of what we consider "prior art" is pretty much bleeding ege and below your general radar. The fact of the matter is that in early R&D phases, many small companies may be working on very similar ideas. I've worked for several of these over the years, and while some had patentable ideas, most didn't bother and simply forged ahead to get the product out the door and into the public hands. From a consumers point of view, that is great! From a companies CFO standpoint? Oh shit.
Anyhow, I'm rambling again. This is a fight in which it seems prudent to take a side. In this case, I only see one champion, and that is TiVo. They cooperate with the hacking community, they use our favorite OS. They don't hide behind a veil of invulnerability (far from it) snd seem to be able to straddle the fence between commercial interests and the public good.
I'm backing TiVo.
and when I first heard about their capabilities, my reaction was "it's about time". All of these patented ideas are *obvious*. If you can convince a judge that you came up with the same thing independently then the patent should not apply to you. Unfortunately I'm told that patent law assumes that I *must* have copied their ideas from their patent since it's publicly available. Sheesh.
And just how is this patent-circus supposed to be good for the economy ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Let the two companies fight out their patents between each other. Likely most will be invalidated, as I'm sure the basic one that TiVo was awarded recently will be. After they're done fighting M$ will either buy up the winner (at a lower cost than now) or sic their own legal team on the patents. I'd make a comment on the obvious nature of patents getting approved, but that would be redundant to dozens of other stories posted over the years. In the PVR market there's only going to be two main players. The mains will be one who kiss content producers ass, and the first one to please the consumer. Microsoft is setup to be the first, and TiVo is making sure they are not the second.
I currently own a TiVo, and simply would stop watching commercial TV altogether without some such device, but their recent business activity has stopped me from upgrading my stand alone to a DirecTiVo. I still think SonicBlue should release the software for their boxes open source and make money off the boxes, they're a seriously bottom contender in the market, and free help on the software (it needs it) combined with some penetration would help.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
TiVo and SONICBlue both holding patents on parts of PVR technology... reading the synopsis, I immediately thought of this post from a story on Macromedia and Adobe getting involved in a patent fight:
"I gained a friend in a the large company that I worked for legal dept... Basically the story went like this, when we are sued we look at their portfolio of patents, then look at our portfolio of patents that we have that might cause their products to infringe... Which ever pile is taller gets paid royalties by the other company. That is a defensive patent."
At the time, I called it one of the "stupidest things I've ever read." Now we get something even stupider; patent fights over parts of the same aggregation of technology that is a PVR.
There are two ways for this to end; either both sides kiss, make up, and milk future PVR manufacturers for massive licensing fees, or the resulting patent apocalypse wipes out at least one combatant, severely harms another, and helps to stall future innovation in home video storage technology.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Sign a cross licensing argeement and further the tech. Or you can stand arround ant wait for recordable DVD to limit your market.
Look at AMD and Intel... they have had such an agreement for 20 yrs now (it was recently renewed again): The best thing for both cos is for X86 to be the dominate platform.
You could try to sell something that your customers want...
ZDNet ran this story yesterday, the article makes some interesting points. Check it out at http://chkpt.zdnet.com/chkpt/up.fd.6020393.ct.in/h ttp://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main /0,14179,2829039,00.html.
AOL's "AOL Everywhere" project has heavily relied on TiVo, they've even set up a forum for PVR owners. Check it out at The AOL TiVo Forum.
Netcraft has confirmed: TiVo is dying Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered TiVo community when recently IDC confirmed that TiVo accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that TiVo has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. TiVo is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict TiVo's future. The hand writing is on the wall: TiVo faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for TiVo because TiVo is dying. Things are looking very bad for TiVo. As many of us are already aware, TiVo continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the TiVo market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that TiVo has steadily declined in market share. TiVo is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If TiVo is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. TiVo continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, TiVo is dead.
Fact: TiVo is dead
At first glance, appears to be incoherent. However, given further thought, one can see the true insight behind an otherwise unintelligible . It could be an analogy to the arcane structure imposed by ; surely my head felt the same way after reading it as it does trying to . Is there a deeper meaning behind , or is it simply a troll short on his medication? We may never know.
My previous employer was almost bought out by SONICBlue. Ken Potashner even came to the office and spewed his "business philosophy" to us.
Then the SB lawyers got ahold of the deal. The LOI (letter of intent) was signed, but they came up with a 50 page document for the Definitive Agreement (a legal term for a binding contract tp buy us). One of the honchos at our company said that that is about 40 pages longer than it should be.
They were such jerks at the negotiating table that eventually our major partner backed out of the deal, leaving our company and its product to wither on the vine.
I hope TiVo runs SB into the ground. If it comes down to it, TiVo could be bought out by AOL (a mahor shareholder) to boost their legal fund. Hell, why not, I worked for one of their companies too once.
- Vincit qui patitur.
IANAL and very far from being one, but...
In UK patent law there is an 'obviousness' clause - if a patent claim is obvious to a reasonable proportion of people trained in a suitable field then it doesn't stand as a patent claim.
I'd argue that the major patents these two organisations are trying to bandy about are obvious not only to softies, or people who work on digtal video or the TV industry, but obvious to pretty much everyone with an IQ over 110.
US patent law doesn't have such a clause that I am aware of (but, as stated before, IANAL and definately not an American one) and so it's possible to patent something blindingly obvious and throw lawyers at anyone who does the same, obvious thing.
It seems a tad on the silly side to me...
Ian Woods
I think I'll just build my own... that way I know I'll still get support in 3 years.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The tivo and sonicblue inventions are unique and non-obvious. They invented the market for these
devices.
This seems like the kind of situation for which patents were created.
Yet people here are spouting off about it putting
a damper on any open source project.
These companies have a good idea, and yet the "open source community" has their arms up in outrage because now The Man wants to protect his intellectual property?
What kind of invention do you think is acceptable
to patent?
Someone on the AVS Tivo board suggested that this may be a gambit by both TIVO and SonicBlue to validate their Patents.
When you think about it, it comes at an odd time (with TIVO being awarded more patents.) This person suggested that SonicBlue would sue TIVO over certain patents, TIVO would countersue, both would settle and cross-license and the patents in question would have precedent in the court system. Both could then turn on MS and demand licensing fees for the validated patents.
Hopefully something like that is happening.
SONICBlue sues TiVo. TiVo countersues.
Scenario #1: If neither one runs out of money before the settlement talks are complete, they settler by cross-licensing. Once they're both happily cross-licensed, they have a new market completely locked up unto themselves. We have two winners and a whole bunch of losers.
Scenario #2: Somebody runs out of money. (Evidently, this would most likely be TiVo.) We have one winner and even more losers.
Either way, we're all a bunch of losers.
Can someone please remind me exactly which part of this alleged patent is non-obvious.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Are there any judgments made about that? Or only threatening letters?
If you get a cease-and-desist letter, and you don't have enough money to pay an attorney to fight it, you effectively have a judgment.
Will I retire or break 10K?
to negotiate the cross license and stipulate to a consent judgment as to validity of each other's patents. Then, armed with the consent decree, they can use the vehicle to support preliminary injunctive relief as against third parties.
Relax, this is just how the game is played. Its the birth of a new enterprise and industry, with a pretty cool and different product that changes the way people enjoy consumer electronics. This is going to set the framework for development, and indeed, will assure at least a pair of effective and worthy competitors poised to beat up on Microsoft when they try to come to play.
At least until Microsoft buys one of them . . .
I know this is OT but what OS does SonicBlue use?
LEPP
If Sonicblue has a set of patents A, and TiVo has a set of patents B, why can't they work together and make a kickass product everyone will want?
Capitalism confuses me sometimes.
But imagine if other industries used the same scheme?
Dodge could sue Jeep and both could settle by acknowledging each others' patents, and the one who benefits most would be Daimler Chrysler who owns both of them.
Doesn't seem legal to me, but IANAL either.
------
Let me give you the lowdown
...that one guy copyrighted Linux and then try to sue companies for royalities? Really, we all know that TiVo came first. Why is this even an issue?
Or a better question: Why doesn't the patent guys bother to check if something else still exists? You can't patent something if it already exists.
I'm just waiting for Microsoft to copyright the word "software".
Zodiac Survey
From what I have looked at, Tivo has patents dealing with the physical hardware and transport of movie files that get recorded to a hard disk.
Replaytv has patents that are pretty similar, but they focus more on the channel guide, and how to record using it.
Tivo submitted their patents on this 8 days before replytv did. They got their patent awarded to them about 6 months prior to when Replaytv got their patents awarded to them.
From what I can see, they are both using each others ideas from the patents, BUT, tivo was there first.
Ah well, im not a lawyer, so I really dont know whos in the right here, but id side with Tivo.
Zeno
C'mon people this is par for the course of any and all industries.
All I know is that my ReplayTV kicks the shiat out of a Tivo. The 30 second skip button alone makes it better...plus there's an undocumented feature that allows you to skip ahead MINUTES by entering a number before pressing the skip button. Heaven!
I remember salivating over ReplayTV back in the early 90's when Tivo was barely a glimmer in a marketer's eye. Wasn't it Marc Andreeson's baby after Netscape? There's no question they have been the innovators in this field...proprietary OS or not. Tivo just has better marketing.
While I may not be a big fan of their taking part in our system's "sue everybody" philosophy, I respect ReplayTV (and SonicBlue by association) for standing up to the networks and incorporating the functionality that I as a consumer want. Tivo is the bitch of the companies that slashdotters love to hate (Big Media). Why would you support them? Just because their (spyware) product is based on Linux?
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.