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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.'"
Adolph Hitler sues Osama Bin Laden for infringements to his xenophobia patents.
So does this mean they'll be taking a SCO approach and be going after whomever inherited ReplayTV and other companies with DVR's on the market? Or even those OSS apps that make your Linux box into a DVR?
It's a shame because I like Tivo alot but saying you're not wanting to litigate people while suing them seems kinda silly.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
What? TiVo has Intellectual Property? All together now, slashdotters (kneejerkers): "TiVo must die!"
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
For those who can't be bothered reading the article; "The suit, filed in federal district court in Texas, alleges that EchoStar's DVR infringes TiVo's ``Time Warp'' patent, which includes the method used to allow viewers to record one program while watching another and the storage format that supports advanced ``TrickPlay'' capabilities such as pausing live television, rewinding and slow motion." This does not mean that they'll be going after every DVR producer, only those who copied TiVo without adding any thought of their own.
So, I guess we'll be seeing more stories about TiVO going down the tubes ... as if it weren't there already (oh, another parallel to SCO).
It's about time Slashdot picked up on this. So does this make Tivo a bad guy now? Probably more important though is the effect this might have on the open source time-shifting software out there.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
So as prior art did they list the PC?
I'm sure I've managed to rip CDs to the hard drive as the same time I'm playing music. Sure it's audio vs video, but it amounts to the same thing don't it?
Plus, I'm not entirely sure it's valid on the non-obvious point. Not having looked at the details I would say to implement it one could just ensure that the input and output subsections are separated, and then treat them individually. Each end has enough of a memory cache to hold a few (10?) seconds of video, and the hard drive takes turns emptying the input buffer and filling the output buffer from different sections (files) on the disk.
... by Dr. Frankenfurter:
"It's just a step to the left..."
Let's do the time warp again!
...and this story worries me. Anybody with some legitamate knowledge have any opinions on this one?
- fozzy
when they win this one who might they sue next? hmmm... Probably a good plan on their part to start with the 'little' guys first. ;)
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.
'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.'
In other words, "We'll only sue you if you don't pay us lots first. We don't WANT to litigate everybody. But we will."
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Copyright and patent laws suck. I swear, if they're going to have IP laws like this, they should teach us NOT to share in Kindergarten.
The suit, filed in federal district court in Texas, alleges that EchoStar's DVR infringes TiVo's ``Time Warp'' patent, which includes the method used to allow viewers to record one program while watching another and the storage format that supports advanced ``TrickPlay'' capabilities such as pausing live television, rewinding and slow motion.
Huh? So I guess ReplayTV and Panasonic ShowStopper paid to license this "invention" from TiVo? I find that hard to believe, but I guess it's possible. Does anyone know for sure, or is ReplayTV (now owned by Denon&Marantz) next on the lawsuit target list? Seems odd that D&M would buy the flailing Replay without thier lawyers noting that their only product depends on an unlicensed patent owned by TiVo.
Of course, this also seems to indicate that TiVo isn't doing so well these days. I had thought they were doing OK.
Finally, I have to express my displeasure that such a patent was ever awarded. If anything, whoever patented the original VCR (assuming someone did) should hold this patent as well. Moving something from tape to digital storage and processing to provide the same features is not innovative enough to deserve a patent.
everything in moderation
Whatever happened to the free sharing of ideas?
Why is it that most people think that noone would want to work on anything without being paid tons of money?
Patent and copyright law are essentialy just manifestations of these sad, capitalistic ideas driving most of the western world.
Hi and color me biased but Charlie Ergen and Echostar built my business only to tear it apart. I was a C-Band dealer for years (Echostar was primary wholsaler) and had a great business only to see them introduce "Dish" that was not available to the dealers that had made them a success.
I have seen the tactics of Ergen purchasing companies and assimilating technology and in some cases reverse engineering IE:Polaroter
Go Go TiVo !!
TG
Gimme a break, the first thing I have to say about this, is other companies have been doing this for years, and Tivo waits until now until to sue? It seems to me that Tivo (obviously) knew about this competitor product, and was just sitting around waiting until the competitor's product reached critical mass (with all of the promotions Dish is running, they have been distribution a very large number of these infringing DVRs). Waiting until the competition is firmly committed in their distrobution gives Tivo the largest advantage (READ: Amount of money).
In cases like this where a company waits around to sue until it will make them the most money, rather than suing to protect their property, should have their patents revoked. Patents are only around to protect inventors, not to make the inventor money (that's what the invention is for).
I find that most often I end up learning from necessity, rather than for enjoyment.
...he was well spoken and got his real intentions across, unlike the recording industry.
... Darl McBride and Jeff Bezos (among others).
So Tivo has patented the idea of recording television using a) a bunch of video codecs they didn't invent, b) a bunch of commodity hardware they didn't invent, and c) the brilliant invention of rewind, fast-forward and get this... pause.
There are many original and non-obvious aspects to the Tivo design. The ability to record television, and (!!!) play it back at the same time, do not count. Give Tivo this one, within five years they'll be claiming patent infringement against anyone who records TV onto a hard-disk.
Incidentally, I remember back when Tivo obtained this patent. A bunch of Slashdot commenters-- with a "RTF(Patent)" attitude similar to yours-- made no effort to conceal their contempt for those of us who thought the patent might affect similar (but non-identical) implementations. IIRC, they made a big deal over the precise details in the claims, and how you would have to infringe upon all of those things to merit a lawsuit. Looks like things aren't quite so rosy.
I liked the idea of Tivo (though not enough to take out a subscription even when they were in business in the UK... I don't watch *that* much TV) but this lawsuit has instantly turned me against them. Claiming IP/patent rights over an *idea* rather than a *technique* is exactly the kind of bullshit thinking that is going to kill off innovation in the West and allow countries like China and India to squash us in the future even as they laugh at our unbelievable stupidity in letting lawyers rule the roost.
Once a company starts bleating about "intellectual property" and issuing lawsuits to protect it rather than actually making a product that people want to buy, then it's doomed. Last I heard, this was a free market. If not enough people want to buy Tivos to keep the company in business, then fuck 'em.
(But in true SCO style, it probably means their share price will rise, so invest now before the company dies its inevitable hideous death!)
Who's the boss of Tivo? Is he going to become the new Darl?
You must think in Russian.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a disgruntled Echostar Ex-employee and would love to see them suffer in court. In fact I may schedule a vacation, head down to texas, microwave some popcorn and enjoy a fun couple of weeks in court. I'm also a happy tivo owner and will continue to provide them revenue unless they piss me off a lot more than this suit does. But I don't think applying a basic CS process to a new type of file should be considered innovative.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Why are people just randomly allowed to patent doing things? "Tivo's can pause and rewind live TV, so they should be the only legal way to do so." So if the train company patented driving you to work, and i decided to walk, i'd be infringing on their patent and hopefully arrested before arriving to work. Justice is served.
Does anybody know if there is any kind history between the two companies?
According to the articles, Echostar has been offering DVR-like capabilities for awhile now; the suit is just based on some of their latest features. And obviously, TiVo has also been in this business for some time. Echostar offers the product with a service, and TiVo offers the product as their primary line of business. In this type of situation, it's only natural that one might approach the other and propose some kind of deal.
Is there any chance that there is a history of offers/solicitations between the two companies, and that TiVo filed the suit because of being rebuffed?
(Disclaimer for the attorneys: This is just wild speculation based on the "sniff test". As in, this suit just seems to be a bit too much from the clear blue sky...)
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
Many of these are obvious and trivial if you simply ask the question. "How do we do X over the Internet?" "Umm basicly just like in the real world?" "Yes, but noone has done it before, let's patent it" should not be patentable.
Which is not to say that there aren't quite a few patents that are neither obvious nor trivial, even after you read them. And quite many that are obvious *after* you read them. But the patent office seems to be approving them all anyway, obvious before, after or never.
If there was a real "obviousness" test process, we could discuss if it's good enough. But from all the hilarious patents I've seen, I'd say it doesn't even exist. I swear, if you wrote it convoluted enough, you could get a patent on breathing.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's hard to imagine anything resembling "intellectual" property ever belonging to Riff-Raff and Magenta, but you are correct!
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
If I were up to infringe a time warp patent, I would create prior art in the past.
it could make Tivo a target for buyout by large copyright holders. If you can't outlaw digital time-shifting, owning a patent on it is the next best thing.
The shareholder is always right.
I'm not big on patents, but I think that the tivo features in discussion here are non-obvious. To get an idea of how non-obvious it is, go to a lay person who is unfamiliar with tivo and try to explain what's so cool about it. They will most likely go, "so it's just like a VCR", and you'll run in mental circles explaining what is cool about Tivo.
Then you sit them down in front of Tivo, hit pause, fast forward through the commercial, etc, and then it dawns on them. Sounds like non-obvious to me. As for non-trivial, that's a little harder to back.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
surely, the patent is on the idea.
how many times, before TiVO even existed have we all dreamed about fast forwarding through those darn commercials? they just made it a reality. no patent should exist for that, really... common sense proves prior art.
(Given the validity and applicability of their patent)
To begin with, unlike SCO, we know what the supposed infringement IS.
The SCO case is about breach of contract. Although the "going after end-users" the managment keeps spouting out is about copyright.
That is ludicrous.. end users have no liability in such a case, since they did not commit the infringement.
(much like a magazine subscriber is not liable if the magazine prints a plagarized story)
In patent cases, this is different. Noone has the right to use patented technology without licence. There is such a thing as contributory infringement concerning patents, which means that you can be liable even if you didn't commit the actual patent infringement.
On the other hand, going after consumers is a bad idea. Not only PR-wise, but there are also laws in place to protect the consumer. So that's very unlikely.
Also, there's no money in sueing private OSS developers.
Anyway, there are a few options here:
They back down and pay for a license
They get lawyers and try to get the the patent invalidated in court
If 2 fails, you can either:
Pay for a license
'Break' the patent, find a workaround with the same functionality which isn't covered by the patent.
Basically, they've received a patent for the hard drive. Hard drives have always been able to read and write at the same time. In a Tivo (or any other device like it) the video is converted to DATA and stored on an IDE hard drive. Data is data. Period. To have granted this patent in the first place is ridiculous. All this is is a data recorder (read:computer) that has video inputs and outputs.
and some monopoly sees it, and makes it.
just, completely ignores you..
what do you do?
do copyrights have no value or purpose in your world/ethical view?
do you know what happened to the inventors of icicle lights?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
See here
The whole thing reminds me of the one-click checkout debacle of amazon.com or some other so-called "e-tailer."
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
So as prior art did they list the PC? I'm sure I've managed to rip CDs to the hard drive as the same time I'm playing music. Sure it's audio vs video, but it amounts to the same thing don't it? Were you ripping your audio CD to hard drive while listening to that same CD 30 seconds earlier on that same track? And there is a huge difference between dealing with a readable medium (a CD) and a broadcast stream (live TV/Radio). You can go forward and backward on the CD. It is part of the data delivery, namely physical recorded media. The Tivo Patent specifically talks about realtime streamed data. Compairing CD ripping/listening to the Tivo patent is like compairing the match to the lightbulb. They both get hot! They both give light!!! There is plenty of prior art!
MythTV has no season passes or wishlists... hard to qualify it as a PVR really - a DVR maybe, but unless I can set it up with my favourite shows then leave it to do its thing without having to worry what time stuff is on, it's not a PVR.
I thought the main moral justification for patents was that inventors wouldn't create new products without the incentive provided by government hand-outs in the form of idea monopolies. So I have to ask, does it seem likely that we would have no PVRs today if this patent wasn't granted? If you believe TiVo Inc. wouldn't have been founded without the protection provided by the patent, and you're confident that we'd all still be using VCR's today, then the patent is justified. For the rest of us, it seems like "Intellectual Property" lawsuits are a cheaper way to harass your competitors (cheaper than, say, improving your product, lowering price, etc.).
And he made me his foe! Clearly, this man is criminally insane. ;)
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Heh, its funny how some companies we like can defend their intellectual property while others we dont are a bunch of tossers for trying to "imprison information and stifle innovation"..
Hmm...wonder if the reaction would be the same if tivo were going after some linux pvr solution offering timeshifting..
Can somebody let a legion of crazy lemmings loose on the USPTO so hopefully they destroy any traces of any patents?
This is abolutely and completely beyond ridiculous. It is no longer any funny....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I will create a device that sends watchers thirty seconds into the future. Pure genius.
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
The first PVR on the market? I remember it being out before Tivos were. Maybe my history is skewed but maybe E* has prior art?
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Tivo and SonicBlue Settle Dispute. According to this article at the Stereophile Guide to Home Theatre, Tivo and SonicBlue have decided to dismiss all patent-infringement claims 'without prejudice' and instead focus their energies on energizing the DVR market. 'We believe our energies are better spent expanding the market for DVRs rather than fighting each other,' the former adversaries said in a joint statement. The article also discusses their plans for marketing and also how they plan to respond to criticisms that the DVR market is doomed.
I would presume they probably got through discovery and realized it was a lose-lose battle and simply ended up cross-licensing each others' IP at the end of it.
ob MS footnote: Note that the old Echostar PVRs werea ctually developed by Microsoft and precursors to what became UltimateTV. Wonder if they'll sue MS too? ;-)
BalamI'm a longtime Dish customer. Yes, I suffered through the long HELL that was the DishPlayer.
Incidentally, my DishPlayer is still in service, and since they fixed the software bugs, it's actually quite reliable. My only complaints, really, are sometimes poor menu response time, and the fact that it's a rather noisy box. I'm sure some extra storage capacity would be nice, but the thing's like 4 years old.
Anyway, EchoStar bought the DishPlayer (their first PVR) technology from Microsoft. (who had, in turn, bought it from another company, as a vehicle for getting WebTV subscribers hooked on MSN - guess what? didn't work! almost zero DishPlayer subscribers I know online actually subscribe to WebTV).
The DishPlayer itself is a rather nice, and simple interface. It doesn't really do much. But what it does is simple to use. It's "OS" is BSD unix. But the client software had some really really nasty bugs a few years back. I was talking with a lawyer who was seriously considering a class action against Dish. But they backed down after Dish finally fixed the problems. Dish actually sued Microsoft and got a settlement from them for their crappy buggy-ass WebTV client software, which was killing the PVR software during schedule downloads.
So I'm wondering if they're suing EchoStar for the implementation in DishPlayer, or the implementation in the later 501 or 721 boxes - whose software was written by EchoStar, and not based on the original DishPlayer stuff.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Hm; I'm running version 0.13 of MythTV, and it seems to do exactly what you're talking about. I go to "Schedule Recordings" in the TV section, browse the very slick Program Guide, select a show to record, and it presents me with a menu. The menu includes "Record only this showing", "Record this show anytime it shows on this channel" and "Record this show whenever it shows on any channel". No duplicates; only new episodes (unless you explicitly set it to record duplicates). I've only had it up and running for two weeks or so, and it's already recorded 10 unique episodes of south park with no intervention on my part (aside from the initial request to record the show whenever it shows).
My experience with MythTV has been quite pleasant; the folks working on the project have done a darn good job thus far.
The concepts of trick-play and time-shifting are arguably obvious, the non obvious thing is how to do it technically. The big question here is how vague are their patents? i.e. how many ways to implement it technically do they think their patents encompass. This, of course, affects whether all DVRs that do trick-play etc. are reckoned to infringe or only DVRs which follow the same techniques.
Now any one doing this has three technical challenges: how to lay the data out on disk to ensure correct replay/storage (remember video and audio are real-time and therefore data has to arrive in a guaranteed time); how to encode the individual streams; and how to construct indexes into the individual data that point to data that can be discretely played whilst in trick mode.
Now there are a lot of papers around from the early 90s (I did some of this research) that tackle the design of filesystems to guarantee timely retrieval. A lot of this pre-dates Tivo.
The encoding of the data on disk affects ability to do playback in reverse. If each video frame was encoded separately (intra-coding), then reverse play is easy. The problem comes with inter-coding techniques like MPEG, which encodes frames based on previous frames, which means the data can only be played back forwards. Here, reverse play can only be done on the separate encoded frames (so-called I frames in MPEG, which typically occur 4 times per second). There are many possible ways of locating these I frames, pre-built indexes or dynamic scanning of the stream are two examples.
There are many ways of doing trick-play and time shifting; to re-iterate, the important question is how vague are their patents, and what do they think is infringing.
Yes, because if you roll your own, and unknowingly implement a feature some company has patented, then you don't get the feature yanked out from under you - you get your bank account raided by litigation lawyers.
If something can be implemented by someone knowledgable in the field quickly and easily, it shouldn't be patentable. Anything like that isn't the sort of innovation that patents are supposed to protect. It is the most recent step, in a series of tiny steps. Innovation is a jump.
I don't know wether PVR time-shifting is innovative or not (I would suspect not - it seems to me it would just be like viewing a half-downloaded MPG file), but if some random slashdotter can knock up an equivelant in a few days, it doesn't deserve patenting.
Patenting wasn't designed to reward people for having a new idea. It was designed to compensate people for spending time, effort and money implementing a new idea. If something requires little time, minimal effort, and no money to develop, it doesn't deserve a patent.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The Company that bought the company that bought the company that bought beta and it's patents is now sueing TiVO for infringing on their device that did timeshifting.
Only if you commercialize it. You are explicitly allowed to copy something in a patent for your own personal and/or research use. It's when you sell it that you need a license.
Case in point: I will be rolling my own, without the record feature. I plan to digitize our library of tapes (lots of kids' movies and shows) and have playback from an interactive menu. The MPEG's are on a RAID system, which the media player accesses read-only over the network. Turning the player off and on can't corrupt the data, nor can the kids delete videos accidentally. When I want to add something, I'll fire up the video capture on another machine, digitize, edit, etc. and then dump it on the server.
I don't care whose patents I may or may not "infringe" because I'm doing this only for my family. There won't be a new startup company, I won't be selling them on e-bay, and I probably won't even put up a webpage on sourceforge. Ergo, the patents don't matter because I'm not marketing the system.
That's why roll-your-own is still viable, no matter how many "look and feel" or software patents a company has.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
That line was not spoken by Frankenfurter. It was Dr. Everett Von Scott - with his pulldown chart! Most of the song was sung by "Riff Raff".
I can't believe that (a) I know that, and (b) I just posted it.
=] grib.
maybe
Lock your doors. The feds are coming for your source code.
no one damn coded or marketed it because everyone KNEW how to do it, but had no cash or balls to go and make it.
You can't assume that if its not sold in walmart it isnt invented.
I wanted a tivo/hd recording back in 93, but was there anything , NO. I did code/develop a DV editing system, so yeah it had recording. But making a digital vcr wasnt on anyones card if the hardware costed $30000 back then. Now if companies have shit loads of cash, they can develop these systems in the hope that in 5-10 years it will be cheaper and be first on the market. But what usually happens is that highend systems get dumbed down to consumer models.
HEY, I saw TimeWarm done in 93 any way, it was a professional system for live tv stop/replay for sports broadcasting, using jpeg encoders/decoders and 1/2 GIG of ram for the storage of 5mins of footage. So yeah, YOU couldnt stop LIVE Tv and rewind etc... BUT the tv station could for you using this, so DUHHHH, its been done.
DONE
DONE
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
They are `violating' a patent, not copyright, and the FSF is against all patents.
"Only if you commercialize it. You are explicitly allowed to copy something in a patent for your own personal and/or research use. It's when you sell it that you need a license."
Really? Where does it say this? I don't disbelieve you, but I've never heard of this provision. Fair Use is a copyright issue, not a patent one. The consolidated rules explicitly say:
(Page 54, 271)
"Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States, or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent." (Emphasis mine)
I browsed through the exceptions in the law, and I couldn't find any for personal use.
Of course, companies are unlikely to sue people who rolled their own and used it, but that's not the point. The point is they are legally entitled to, and now have a lever against you that they can utilize whenever they wish.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
So does this make Tivo a bad guy now?
Yes. Suing over one of these "I had the idea in the shower" patents is an express ticket onto my shitlist.
I am definately not a lawyer, and reading the patent is mind numbing (perhaps the patent office staff is just unable to comprehend what they read in these things and therefore just guess as to whether it's valid or not), but the prior art sections of patent 6,327,418 do mention that VCR and computer possibilities.
From my understanding:
For VCRs they mention that it can't record and play the same program simultaneously without the aid of multiple units, although they acknowledge that VCRs can play, rewind, fast forward, etc. already recorded media.
On the computer side, they provide that it could record the program, but that would not necesarily record any additional streams in the signal such as secondary audio or closed captioning, or ensure that playback of those streams is syncronized with the primary video/audio.
The other patent - 6,233,389 - has a summary of the same information in the prior art area, although it adds that patent 5,371,551 'teaches a method for concurrent video recording and playback', but that the processor would have to be extremely fast to do this. (This was back in early 2001, when processors were just getting around to 2 GHz?)
I'm going to give up on reading the patent, but perhaps they are just referring to something that does all of this in a small VCR sized box.
Regardless, I have a TiVo, I love my TiVo, and my wife loves it even more.
And the fact checking in this article was just on a once-over for the most part. Don't depend on it in life-threatening situations.
it could make Tivo a target for buyout by large copyright holders.
This has already begun. CBS (part of Viacom), Showtime (part of Viacom), Disney, NBC (part of Universal), America Online (part of Time Warner), DirecTV (1/3 owned by Fox), and Sony own parts of TiVo Inc. MPAA is Paramount (part of Viacom), MGM, Sony, Disney, Warner (part of Time Warner), Fox (part of News), and Universal. This leaves MGM as the only MPAA studio without a finger in TiVo.
Tivo and Replay TV own a majority of the patents covering this technology, so it's not at all surprising they are attempting to receive their due licensing fees.
Tivo and Replay TV have a patent sharing agreement among themselves, but it does not carry over to other manufacturers. Between them they own enough patents to have virtual control over the technology.
The reason I suspect they're moving now is because many of the big cable and satellite companies have built PVR functionality to their set top boxes. The nationwide releases of such products from Comcast and Echostar has already started. If it goes well, as I suspect it will, the rest of the cable world will not be far behind.
If Tivo and Replay were to allow their technology to be "rented away" in cable company set top boxes, it would likely put Tivo and Replay out of business.
I expect Replay and Tivo will both try to receive license payments from any cable companies rolling out cable-box PVR's. As well they should, they each have a very full patent portfolio covering the technology.
Bottom line, why in the world should the big cable and satellite companies get a free ride, and not have to pay for technology they didn't even develop?
Because no matter what happens in regards to licensing, the cable co's are going to make one heck of a lot of money renting these set-top PVR's. So why shouldn't the legitimate patent holders, Replay and Tivo, at least receive some licensing fees for having developed the technology in the first place? That's what patents are all about after all.
Everytime we hear about a new invention/method, we always go, dang, why didn't we think of that! why? cuz it seems so obvious and trivial.
...) and look up his mailing address and credit account yourself, so you don't have to ask him for his credit account number or mailing address with every order. Bingo: One-click shopping.
Heard a story about that. (i.e. I haven't fact-checked this myself...)
The core of a flashlight battery is a zinc cup full of caustic paste capped by some asphalt-like material, with a carbon rod (wrapped in a bit of hydrogen scavenger if you don't want it to go soft on you under load) stuck down the middle. The cup is the negative electrode and the carbon rod the positive. Power is generated by the paste eating the cup from the inside.
At one time flashlight batteries were JUST that, wapped in cardboard and maybe with a metal cap over the tip of the rod to improve contact. This caused probles: Since the paste ate the cup, when the battery was nearly gone (but still producing plenty of power) the paste would eat a hole, soak the cardboard, and start destroying the (metal) flashlight.
Union Carbide (Eveready) "solved" this by guaranteeing that if their batteries ate your flashlight they'd give you another one. Didn't stop 'em eating the flashlights, of course. But they made good on their flashlights. By buying cheap flashlights wholesale. B-)
Of course everybody was trying to solve this problem. For years. Without success.
One day one of the engineers came home depressed and his wife (opening one of the newfangled steel cans of veggies for dinner) asked him why he was so down. "Because things weren't going well at work. We can't seem to solve the problem we're working on." he replied.
"What are you trying to do?"
"We're trying to find a way to keep batteries from leaking and destroying the flashlights."
"Well, why don't you seal them in a steel can?"
And thus was born the Ray-O-Vac sealed-in-steel battery.
Which they patented.
And which patent Eveready/Union Carbide challenged as "obvious".
Judge: "How long did you guys at Ray-O-Vac work on this problem and how much did it cost you?"
Ray-O-Vac: "This many years, this many dollars."
Judge: "How long did you guys at Union Carbide work on this problem and how much did it cost YOU?"
Union Carbide: "That many years, that many dollars."
Judge: "Doesn't sound obvious to me. Judgement for Ray-O-Vac."
MOST "AHA!" moments look obvious AFTER the fact.
= = = =
Having said that: Emulating something on a computer is IMHO obvious. So is taking advantage of the beneficial side-effects of the fact that you're dealing with an emulation on a computer rather than the thing emulated. Business methods, for instance.
Example: Use web page forms rather than a phone call or paper mail to do mail-order. Recognize the user by side-effects of his communication (preprinted order forms, recognizing his voice when he calls, browser cookies {which were ALWAYS intended to create a persistent identity across http requests},
Recording a TV signal to disk is half of the obvious emulation of a VCR on a computer. Playing disk data to a TV signal, with ability to pause/skip/fast-forward/fast-reverse is the other half.
Doing it on a multitasking computer, using separate applications for record and playback, has two side-effects:
- You can record one show while watching another.
- You can watch a show WHILE it's being recorded, pausing for munchies and bathroom breaks and skipping/fast-forwarding through commercials up to the real-time point where the show is being recorded and played back with imperceptable delay.
If I understand the patent correctly, this IS the time-shifting "invention". And as a straightforward emulation of a VCR on a computer it is thus obvious.
Additional side-effects are that you can record as many shows si
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
First, I want to say that I am completely objected to frivolous lawsuits. (The SCO Lawsuit is frivolous - they have no right to charge users to run linux before they have won in court)
Now that I've made that clear, I want to say that I completely support TiVo in this decision. The Dish Network PVRs are complete rip-offs of TiVo, right down to the design of their remote (they even took Tivo's trademark yellow pause button!). Dish Network is clearly and obviously trying to cut in on TiVo's business, and has been recently offering free PVRs to new subscribers. TiVo has every reason to be worried that their designs are being stolen. They rightfully own the patent, and the Dish PVR is a direct rip-off on TiVo; I believe that this is a fair use of the American patent system.
That being said, I can't say much in favor of Echostar. They have been known for their cutthroat business practices (most of which do very little to benefit the company itself), and the entire company is disorganized. Just look at forums around the 'net. You will find hordes of people who all hate echostar. I should know. I subscribe to their service. Over the past year, the quality of video streamed to my house has gotten poorer and poorer as they decrease the mpeg bitrate (on some channels, pixelation is VERY obvious). Fortunately for me, I've had very few other problems with the service, and haven't had to deal much with the company... so I see no reason to switch to DirecTV. But if the opportunity presents itself, I might switch.
This isn't the first time Echostar has been in legal trouble. They seem to have a bad history of lawsuits, patent-infringments, and tons of FCC violations. Hell... their CEO is also a professional gambler.
I may as well add here that I've used the Dish PVR. It does highly resemble TiVo, but lacks its ease of use.
I also own a panasonic time-slip DVD recorder, and I can safely say that it is quite different than Tivo's time-warp feature. It comes much closer to resembling a fancy VCR than a PVR.
Prior art probably won't be an issue. Sure, most of the geeks claim it was possible back in '96, but in all practicality, it wasn't possible with consumer-grade hardware. A Pentium-100 simply lacked the power to record and play NTSC resolution video simultaneously... not to mention that you'd fill up that 2gb hard drive very very quickly. The only thing I can think of that would allow such a "Time-Warp" would be the Amiga video Toaster; those date way back farther than '96.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I'm glad I have mod points today. This is a great point that I have yet to see made on Slashdot, that makes so much sense. My ancestors were involved in two major patents, the Cathode Ray Tube and the modification to grow string beans without the strings. Now these are things that are really a jump. TiVo is just crap.
MAD PROPS coming your way...
Networks have used a five-second delay for live broadcasts to be able to bleep swearing for years. That's time-shifting. Does it make it suddenly patentable because someone used that idea in a home PVR?
Also instant replays. (TV signal to disk, disk to TV signal, though in this case using a two-headed disk, if I recall the process correctly.)
(Aside: I knew a college radio station that did on-the-cheap "tape delay" using two tape recorders at opposite ends of a hall, with the tape running down the hall between them. Guy at the recording end would hang a folded piece of paper on the tape when someone said something inappropriate, and an engineer, walking around in the hall, would "bleep" the item by wiping the tape with a permanent magnet, then return the folded paper tags for reuse.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is all a non-issue as Amazon will prove they already patented this.
damn it. it undid my moderation. didn't know the rules. oops, should have posted as an AC.
The dish network boxes do not encode the video stream, that might be enough to avoid the lawsuit.
Before the days of digital video recording, broadcasters wanted "instant replay" for their sports events. In 1978, I interned for ABC sports as a college "assitant" during a college bowl game. They had this neat device that recorded video onto a magnetic platter. Total recording time was only about 30 seconds, but you could play back from anywhere, at any speed, while the recording was still in progress. This is the 100% analog solution that lets you zip around a video stream.
There were obviously limitations of the technology. First, was is only 30 seconds. Second, they were notoriously flakey. Third, they cost a lot more than a car.
Tivo is an obvious example of using new technology to do something that a lot of people have wanted to do for a long time. None of the individual elements of Tivo are new. The encoding of the video/audio is uninteresting. The creating of sliding windows is trivial and obvious. Tivo did not invent the hard disk, the encoding algorithsm, the D/A converts. Come to think of it, they are just an integrator putting together obvious elements.
I hope they get squashed.
...to find out why this is happening.
A friend of mine works at a hedge fund, and they're shorting the hell out of Tivo. Why? Because the conventional wisdom is that Tivo is going to die from the "free" DVRs that the cable co's and Dish are offering.
For example, Time Warner, an early investor in Tivo (well, the AOL side), is renting non-Tivo DVRs. This is not a good thing to Tivo.
This lawsuit is an attempt to bring the stock shorts back in line, and to fire a shot across the bow of anyone bundling DVRs - and to regain control of the DVR industry in the process.
Part of me wants Tivo to lose the battle, because while they may have been the first to use those ideas for that particular purpose, some of their patents do fit into the "duh" category.
However, another part of me wants them to win. I don't want to see yet another innovative company--and yes, Tivo is an innovative company despite their patents, die simply because imitators like Echostar take their basic idea, after someone else has done all the work and taken all the risk, and "cheap" Tivo out of business. I've seen it too many times, and every time this happens, it makes it that much more difficult for innovative companies to get funding, and that much more logical to justify Microsoft-style innovation as a business model.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
So you think that minor variations on an existing idea (ok, we've taken recording and made it digital and "live") and patent the hell out of it so that nobody else can use them until they have no value?
This *could* have been done before with a lot of tape, or a seriously expensive system, but it was cost-prohibitive. The fact that new technology revolutions (mainly quality digital video) enabled additional functionality to your video recording unit shouldn't make it broadly patentable.
Really, patents should work in a way that uniqueness of an idea determines the reach of patent. A truly new idea with very little in the way of prior art (none of this, "yes, our invention is similar but different because..."), where ideas that are less of a "leap" should be able to be made in different forms using different methods. E.G. you do the same thing but in a fairly different or more efficient way, patent doesn't stand up.
There was nothing to stop you from filling your hard drive up or watching one video while recording another (if you had SCSI drives - e.g. a Mac) - nothing except hard drive space.
A lot of video professionals (and enthusiasts) have been doing this stuff for the last several years, since the heady days of the .com hype at least. I remember being impressed that a buddy of mine could watch and record TV on his $5,000 computer just like I could with my $500 TV and pair of VCRs.
Just like I can today with my $500 TV and pair of VCRs - and my Tivo, if I can ever get off my big fat ass long enough to buy a replacement access card for the one some jerk ripped off.
But I digress...
The patent system needs to be fixed. I'm all for patents - reasonable licensing fee (or drug cost) for a limited period of time and then the public gets it gratis - part of the trade-off for both people and corporations in modern society. However, software and algorithm 'patents' are another matter. They're stupid, and this is exactly what this is - a gussied up software 'patent.'
Software - like movies - falls under copyright law, whether it's open-source a la GPL or proprietary-ware drenched in a click-wrap EULA.
This is where I fall back on a patent version of what LawMeme (IIRC) calls "CopyNorms," the social norms of copyright and what we think it should say, regardless of what the law actually says.
My father was a research chemist, with approximately 40 patents to his name when he retired. I do remember him telling us all about patents (BOOOOOORING) and he said that the whole purpose of publishing a patent after it is granted was so that everybody else could dink around with it and decide if they wanted to license it. Ergo, you are "doing research" to decide if the method/invention patented is worth a license. Now, that is most certainly not in the text of the law, but apparently, this happens quite a bit at the commercial level. And yes, the patent holder is quite likely to find out about it if you decide to make your product without licensing the patent: witness Polaroid's successful suit against Kodak over instant cameras.
As a personal user, a patent holder will not find out about you using their patents in your own stuff. Of course, if you set up a web page to tell others how to do it, it will eventually crop up on their radar screen.
In conclusion, this particular patent appears to heavily suck bollocks.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
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.'"
Interesting that the CEO would specificly state that TiVo is NOT interested in the SCO model of revenue through litigation, and goes to pains to stress that much.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
If it was so obvious, why didn't you or any other person patent it first?
Maybe it was so obvious he did come up with it first. And likely realized it was so obvious it wasn't patentable, and so didn't even start the footrace to the patent office, much less win it. Or maybe he did try to patent the idea despite its obviousness, and despite having invented the idea first, lost the footrace to the patent office because his postal worker took a coffee break and the patent application didn't get shipped across the country in that day's mail.
In this day and age, when dozens of people independently "invent" the same thing more or less at the same time simply because it is an idea whose "time has come" (the pieces and infrastructure that make the realization of that idea are in place for the first time), it is the corporation with the fastest lawyers who wins the footrace to the patent office, denying any other inventors of the same technology the right to use their own inventions, much less anyone else from building upon them.
The number of patents for non-obvious methods are vastly outweighed by the number of obviouse, trivial, unenforcable patents that are issued and that remain profitable because challenging them in court is just too damn expensive, and there are just too many tens of thousands of the fucking things (enough to bankrupt the entire GDP in litigation costs if they were all to be challenged).
The result? Our free market of competition of free no more: it has been reduced to a planned economy of entitlement monopolies, and the stock market little more than a glorified futures market on said monopolies (at least in the medical and technical arenas).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It will end when lawyers stop making massive amounts of money. (Ie, never).
How about FTP'ing large files from remote locations, and reading/processing/editing such files while the transfer is in progress? Technically, the FTP process is a "stream", and the read/process/edit operation goes one step beyond what TIVO claims in their patent... so perhaps I should patent that? After all, I was doing this in 1990 with 100MB+ model files coming from a remote supercomputer. Since we didn't want to wait for the entire download to occur prior to figuring out whether the data was good, we concurrently processed the "stream" during download. The only difference between that process, and Tivo's patent is that Tivo calls their stream "realtime", and it applies to Multimedia data. Big deal. It's still a data-stream representing encoded "realtime" analog signals, so "realtime" is actually irrelevant. It could be bursts, or pretty much anything non-realtime. And lets go for one more prior art - pictures/video sent from NASA's probes... I believe they practiced something similar, also far prior to 1998 when these patents were filed. So I hope Tivo loses these patents, as the "invention" was actually done by many others far prior to their timeline.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
They've been doing these tricks for decades, using tape, to delay while recording, record while playing, etc. "Tape delay", I believe it is called. Gives the broadcast manager control over what actually goes out over the air as a "live" broadcast. Slightly more manual process, but the process (and all the things they can do with it) are the same. Take it a step further and think back to the "time delayed" Olympic broadcasts. They did everything that ReplayTV and the others can do, but they did it slower and it was between the camera and the viewer (who viewed it "live", but time delayed), not the cable box stream and the viewer.
I think that Echostar screwed me, and therefore I will reflexively root for anyone who opposes them, regardless of the merits, ethics and morality of their actions.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
No sir that beige box in the AV rack is not a DVR its just an Air Circulation unit. Mythtv Rocks Thanks Issac
If this was Microsoft they would be getting reamed a new one by how evil they are for using their patents aggressively (even though they have no real history of doing so). Since it's Tivo, the geeks wet dream, it's OK though.
Well, XMLTV is open source and there are other free/GPL TV-listing libraries available. Many even grab listings from web-based guides like tv-guide.com or titantv.com...
So, I guess if XMLTV somehow went under or started charging and all development stops so noone picked up the GPL code and the other free libraries which would work in its place all go tits-up which would pretty much require every website that carries tv listings to go down, they yeah... those bastards could really screw us over. So yes, death of open source + massive internet rollback could spell the end of MythTV listings. Forgive me if I keep my foil hat in the closet.
Or, more likely, your TiVo breaks and that nice $199 (or is it $250, no no... it's $299 now) non-transferable lifetime membership becomes useless and you shell out again. Not to mention upgrades...
As for misspellings and such in the guide... I've never noticed any. Even if SouthPrak was spelled wrong I highly doubt it would convince me to shell out to a pay service. In fact, my ReplayTV system has had more difficulty with their dial up crap and downtime than XMLTV has ever had.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
my Tivo has a menu item that says "Record to VCR".
:
It's true they haven't done this part
"Longer programs can be scaled to fit onto smaller video tapes by speeding up the play speed or dropping frames."
but they're updating the software all the time, and Tivo today does everything else listed.
... apart from FOX *cough* News being the devil and patents being a tool of the devil, no.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
I hate to get technical on this pathetic subject, but that wasn't Dr. Scott. It was The Criminologist played by Charles Grey of James Bond fame. Dr. Scott was the guy in the wheelchair.
Well, someone else has already pointed out that it wasn't Dr. Scott, so I'll argue against the statement that Riff-Raff sang "most" of the song. Magenta sings very nearly the same amount of the song as Riff-Raff, and Columbia has a quick verse too. So Riff-Raff's part is perhaps about 40%.
/.
And incidentally, it's Frank N. Furter.
Sad that we're discussing this in such detail on
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Uhm, Digital VCR's do use a codec, do have fast forward, rewind, pause and if you have two tuners you can watch and record at the same time or do PIP.
Tivo is blowing smoke. The ability to use of the shelf technology and software to achieve functionality of archiving and recording shouldn't have been patentable.
Now if tivo had patented a HIGH QUALITY CODEC that had specific features for high quality video playback/recording they could have patentend that specific piece.
But they didn't do anything that i can't do on a much bigger and better scale 4 years ago and now.
I wonder when microsoft will be sued for the media pc?
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
I'll have to find the missions, but NASA used sold state recorders that replaced tape recorders to log mission data (scientific and operational spacecraft health etc). And yes, we would record while we did playback all the time.
Million dollar memory boards (1987 timeframe)
Its been done. At the very least, Fairchild Space (now part of Orbital Sciences) did it.
So recording TV programs has been done, playback has been done, simultanious record and playback has been done. So what is the patent really about?
I guess there is a real risk to defending a patent, you might just find out it isn't valid. I guess holding an untested (in courts) patent is more valuable - for catching investors
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
The vast majority of websites that carry tv listings actually use zap2it's system. If zap2it were to block scrapers, then it would make it very difficult to get tv listings.
isnt that funny that echostar just got 500 million in debt financing from sbc communications. and was set to launch sbc dish network very soon. this is boardroom jockeying. peace.
Sad that we're discussing this in such detail on /.
Yes, people will think we're geeks or something...