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TiVo vs EchoStar - TiVo Wins
ssuchter writes "A jury just ruled in favor of TiVo in their suit against EchoStar, awarding TiVo $73M of the $87M they asked for. From the article: 'TiVo had sought $87 million in damages from the Dish satellite-TV network in a patent dispute that TiVo lawyers said could be "life or death" for the company that sold the first box for pausing and rewinding live television.'"
Well Tivo did win the first trial (or the first battle in the war) but this is far from over. Let's look at a few points: 1) EchoStar posted profits of 1.5 billion for the year 2005. Tivo by contrast hasn't posted any profits and has lost close to half a billion since their inception. So guess who has the bigger pockets? 2) The next court that EchoStar will likely appeal to typically overturns 40% of the lower court rulings 3) Tivo's patent is currently being investigated by the US Patent Office. If they revoke that patent you can pretty much kiss Tivo good bye. It should be interesting to see how this battle continues.
... and it's not a TiVo. It's a VCR that uses disk instead of tape to do it's recording. Yeah you get the benefits of a random access storage medium, so you can watch whil you record and pause, etc.
But is doesn't have the nice features that TiVo has. I can't record all episodes of a certain show, I can only give it a time to record (and it doesn't auto adjust if a game goed long). I can't tell it to record everything for a certain actor. Amongst other things.
Now I never used a TiVo, but from what I have been told, the Dish PVR doesn't compete.
I am surprised that TiVo won this case. Dish network had the 7100/7200 which could pause and record live TV before TiVo's patent. It may have been a piece of shit but it was still first. Obviously Echostars product would improve over time and the similarities of the current models are logical advance in the technologies.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Found on a TiVo press release.
US Patents
6,850,691 - Automatic playback overshoot correction system
6,847,778 - Multimedia Visual Progress Indication System
6,792,195 - Method and Apparatus Implementing Random Access and Time-Based Functions on a Continuous Stream of Formatted Digital Data (continuation of 6,327,418)
6,757,906 - Television Viewer Interface System
They also have exclusive licensing rights to
5,241,428 - Variable-Delay Video Recorder
Japanese Patents
3615486 - Multimedia Time Warping System
Chinese Patents
ZL 99804757.0 - Method and Apparatus Implementing Random Access and Time-Based Functions on a Continuous Stream of Formatted Digital Data (see US patent 6,327,418)
ZL 00805987.X - Data Storage Management and Scheduling System
This is of March 2005, they may have more since then. Also, if you want to search the text of the US patents, you can start here
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
As a Tivo stockholder, I've been following the trial as closely as I could. The patent focused on what they called the 'time warp' aspect. What came out in testimony was that the original echostar dish stuff could *not* let you watch a prerecorded program *and* simultaneously be recording a new program. It seems this functionality only made its way in to dish products *after* they had access to a Tivo which the Tivo dev team left them during a licensing/partnership meeting. Bad move on Tivo's part to leave equipment in a potential competitor's hands, obviously. What seemed to come out is that it was true the original echostar dish products *didn't* infringe on the Tivo patents, but that's not what they've been selling for a long time - they've been selling products that infringe on the patent.
So, given that such a large company had a 'similar' product on the market *before* Tivo, and it didn't have anywhere close to the functionality which Tivo patented, it would seem to be that the 'non-obvious' or 'novel' aspects of the patent got a significant boost. If it was such an 'obvious' way of performing this trick, the people with an earlier technology would have indeed developed the 'obvious' technique and used it in their product.
creation science book
EchoStar Statement Regarding VERDICT IN TiVo Inc. v. EchoStar Communications Corp. LAWSUIT
April 13, 2006 - This is the first step in a very long process and we are confident we will ultimately prevail. Among other things, we believe the patent - as interpreted in this case - is overly broad given the technology in existence when TiVo filed its patent. We believe the decision will be reversed either through post-trial motions or on appeal. Additionally, the Patent Office is in the process of re-examining TiVo's patent, having determined there is a substantial question concerning the validity of the patent.
DISH Network subscribers can continue to use the receivers in their homes, including their DVRs. Furthermore, TiVo dropped their claim that EchoStar's Dishplayer 7200 DVR infringes their patent.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Patent infringement cases are exclusively federal jurisdiction, so any state laws pertaining to damages would be completely irrelevant. More importantly, there aren't "punitive" damages in patent infringement cases -- the patentee is entitled to lost profits or a reasonable royalty for past infringement and an injunction against future infringement. Where the jury finds the infringement to be willful, that number can then be trebled.