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TiVo sues EchoStar for Patent Infringement
jhkoh writes "TiVo has filed a lawsuit against satellite TV provider EchoStar for infringing on its 'Time Warp' patent for DVR time-shifting. TiVo CEO Mike Ramsay adds: 'Our aim here is not to litigate everybody ... but to further advance and seek commercial relationships so that people recognize the value of our intellectual property, and give us fair compensation.'"
Trick Play Patent No. 6,327,418
Time Warp Patent No. 6,233,389
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
Exectuive -> Human translation:
'Our aim here is not to litigate everybody, just the people who don't pay us liscencing fees'
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Actually Replay and Tivo made an agreement a couple of years ago as they both had key patents.
A patent on a bloody idea. Pausing live TV. What's involved in that? A storage device with a write head for recording incoming data and an independently targettable read head. Wow. I'm sure glad they patented that, with ninety three claims of course and a bunch of technobabble, but essentially that.
Does anyone remember when there was at least the polite pretense of patents having to describe a new and non-obvious METHOD?
When I covered a bit of patent law in Electronics we were taught that for a patent to not be overturned, you'd need to be able to take reasonably skilled professionals in the industry and state the same problem and requirements. If they could easily independently invent the device described in the patent, the patent was too obvious.
Tivo is just trying to patent their feature list - making it impossible for anyone to create any device which provides the same functions.
Not SCO like. More RAMBUS like - flagrant abuse of the patent system.
explain how I can use one vcr to record one show while I watch a previously taped show?
Or how I can pause live tv without having a tape running constantly 24/7?
Or how I can decide after the fact to record a show after it's already started (assuming that I do it in the first half hour or so)?
Or how I can keep one show for months on a tape while recording around it?
or erasing shows from the middle of the tape while still being able to record shows in the unused spots?
Hmmm??? I didn't think you could...
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Looking at the patent in question, at least 90% of it is quite obvious, even if the execution is difficult to program. The fact that it's difficult to program does not make it non-obvious though. They, of course, list out every minute step, as the patent process requires them to do, but all this does is obfuscate what the system actually does. Quite simply, it converts the incoming video stream (which could be in any of several formats) into an MPEG file on a hard drive. That file can be manipulated by the user through their interface (play, pause, rewind, FFW, etc.). So, while their system is nifty, the patent is, at the very least, very overbroad. While there may be some part of it that is deserving of a patent, the patent is very bad as it stands right now.