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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.'"
Good to hear an innovative company is able to have its patent respected...
Bad thing is, the lifespan on a patent will probably make that what is right now good news, later becomes bad news
No sig for the moment.
If EchoStar's lawyers argued the case with lines like:
"I don't think 190,000 people would have bought this particular toy if they could have gotten it free from their cable company."
no wonder they lost. I think that was TiVo's point, free boxes from the cable companies ( if you want to call subsidized by higher cable rates "free") cost Tivo sales.
You miss the point. First off, the jury ruled the infringement was knowingly done, ie, deliberate, so the judge could triple the damages awarded to TiVo.
But it's not about one settlement from Dish/Echostar. TiVo will make much more money licensing its patents, and selling its software and services. Five years down the road and the money TiVo will be making in new business will make this award money look like chickenfeed. It's about getting TiVo's patents enforced, and getting cable companies and satellite companies to do business with TiVo. It's the legal decision that matters, not the size of the monetary award.
This was one patent I wanted to be upheld. Tivo put a lot of work into getting DVR's off the ground, and the have a rabid fanbase but almost nothing to show for it. Tivo makes a great product, I'm glad they won the first round and hope that this is the start of really good things for the company. As someone who has used the knock off's they sure didn't do a good job knocking them off, their product sucks. That said - I know a few people who absolutely love my tivo's but are content just getting by with the cable companies DVR because it only costs $6/month, which is exactly what this lawsuit is about. Sure did make my purchase of stocks last Friday pay off :)
On the one hand I'm happy to see a company that created a truly new product be rewarded.
On the other hand I'm not sure that what TiVO did wasn't obvious. Using a HD rather than a videotape was surely obvious and automating the process of recording shows is not only obvious but far from original. All TiVO did is put both of these things together in a convient package and I find it hard to formulate any principled rule that would call TiVO's developments non-obvious but NPT's blackberry patent obvious.
The difference seems only to be that geeks like TiVO and TiVO hasn't being suing individuals who decide to set up their computers to tape shows for them. But if they do get their patent enforced that is exactly what they *could* do in the future.
In the end I tend to think the TiVO patent should have been rejected as obvious. However, I think the only reason TiVO didn't make money is the monopoly cable companies and satellite companies have on their markets. When data service becomes the commidity everyone buys and there is free competition amount content providers on an open protocal companies like TiVO won't be shut out by monopolists who can make it difficult for TiVO to penetrate their markets.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
>>f they revoke that patent you can pretty much kiss Tivo good bye.
Then so f'n long. Its not the job of the courts to make sure you remain profitable. Especially over their "time warping patent" which in a nutshell is "we patent computers recording tv video for later playback." Uhh, no. Hope you lose. There's a difference between first to market and innovation. They've been nice enough to stay away from MythTV but waiting on the niceness of corporations isn't what I call justice. Tivo's patent should be revoked. Hell, they havent made a profit in years (ever?) so these patents aren't exactly holding them together to begin with.
I'd rather kiss Tivo goodbye than anything that resembles a tivo (like mythtv) because of silly american patent law. If it takes another silly suit from echostar to question this patent, then all the better. No one else can afford to take Tivo on. There's no ACLU for ridiculous patents to fight the patent abusers.
>>novel invention in my books. I
Take videotape out. Check. Put hard drive in. Check. Get patent. Check. Novel invention?
Recording television and watching it later. Hmm. I was doing this as a kid on my dad's old Betamax in the early 80s. Lets not push it here. Its a shame that companies like google and tivo have this geek halo around them, where we all just decide to give them a severe double standard. I'm certain if MS had this patent blood would be spilled by now.
Disclaimer - I used to work for Philips. I'm still using a Series 1 Tivo that has been seriously upgraded. I own some Tivo stock.
Tivo has been compared to the VCR and with that logic, does not deserve patent protection. I disagree and believe that Tivo did innovate and does deserve patent protection.
What Tivo did first:
1) Downloadable program guide - Before Tivo, the only automated way to record was VCR+. It was lame and with TV Guide print deadlines 3-4 week before publish date it was shaky.
2) Digital recording - Though I agree that substituting a hard disk for a tape (media) may not deserve a patent, Tivo was the first successful use of mass market MPEG-2 recording. My tivo was 20 hours at first, this was an exponential leap. Tivo took open-source code (Linux), developed proprietary code and hardware, a dial-up infrastructure and made it work. They also, to the best of my knowledge, have honored the GPL and released their GPL tainted code back.
3) User interface - don't even try to tell me this is derivative of any VCR interface that exists today. Tivo's GUI is 6 years old and it still works well.
4) 30-sec skip, wish lists, filters, etc. might be considered standard now but when Tivo implemented them, they were revolutionary to the TV market and pre-digital TV.
I ABOLUTELY do not believe in patent protection where prior art exists or where it's basic physics or biology, etc. that someone is trying to patent. That said, I believe that Tivo innovated, took risk, and is trying to defend its investment and true intellectual property. This is what the patent system and at a more basic level, property rights are all about.
The real issue and problem is not Echostar, it is Hollywood and the MPAA. Tivo is the ultimate fair-use device. They deserve protection for their ideas and the right to survive in a FAIR market on their own ideas.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
If all Tivo's patent is is the idea of recording one show while watching another, than it should be thrown out. There's nothing revolutionary or non-obvious about it. People were recording one show while watching another with their TV/VCR setups long before Tivo ever came around. If Tivo hadn't put this feature in their DVR, there still would have been thousands of consumers who would have thought, "hey, being able to record one show while watching another would be a great feature to have on these things." That right there should be proof that it was an obvious idea. Now, if Tivo's patent isn't just the general idea, but istead a specific way to impliment that idea, then they might have a point.
Could you record to and playback from random locations on that video tape at the same time? No? Well then they did way more than replace a tape with a drive, didn't they?
You try taking a hard drive from 1997 and recording and playing back MPEG2 data in real time simutaniously on it. You already know they figured it out, and it would still be a challenge even if you were an expert (which it seems fairly clear you aren't since you con't grasp the complexity of the problem).
That's what was novel about TiVO's device. They had the same hardware limitations as everybody else, but they figured out how to get the data on and off anyway. TiVO didn't make their device work because they put a faster drive in their box than Echostar. They made it work because they were smart about where to put the data. That's not trivial.
Unfortuantly, it's more likely that a patent license will be in the works for DirecTV. DirecTV seems more interested in limiting functionality to it's users than Tivo. If I can't Tivo with DirecTV anymore, they'll lose a customer, because their new DVR is just a DVR, it doesn't do what you expect your Tivo to do.
The difficulty of that in 1997 was a function of the crappy hard drives of the day. But what does that have to do with the current situation? TiVo's patent is still in force for hard drives that can easily handle a dozen streams. Today, on any linux box with a MPEG capture card I could type:
...and I'd be violating this patent. That wasn't hard at all. The problem isn't complex.I know it's not free, but most cable company DVRs cost about $10/month extra which is about the same price as Tivo's program guide service. If they're making money at all, it's probably from jacking up the base price of cable TV to subsidize low (possibly predatory) pricing.
As of my posting, the parent comment is rated as a troll. As far as I can tell, this is because the moderators like TiVo. If this were any other company, half the posts here would be saying the same thing as the parent.
TiVo deserves credit for being first to market with a working product, but I see nothing about about their product that is original enough to be deserving of patent protection. It's possible that there are aspects of their hardware design that are patentable, but with advancing technology it should be nothing that can't be worked around for slightly greater cost.
TiVo did not invent digital recording nor digital playback. They were merely the first to successfully commercialize it.
Recording and playing at the same time? Please! I could do that using two VCR's twenty years ago. Bundling the functionality in a single package due to advancing technology is so obvious it hurts.
Specifying shows you want to have recorded using parameters other than times of day is certainly obvious. I've done it before. (Hey Bob! Can you record the Simpsons for me? Thanks. ) The only challenge there is creating the database of descriptions of television shows. Having software guess at what you might want to watch has only not been done before because of the limitations (time-wise) of the recording medium.
The idea that any of these things should be patentable is absurd. Hardware designs to achieve these ends may be patentable but the functionality itself ought not be. Did the Wright brothers patent flying? No, they patented the design of parts of their flying machine.
It's good to make lists like this but there are a couple to shorten it by.
2) Digital recording - Though I agree that substituting a hard disk for a tape (media) may not deserve a patent, Tivo was the first successful use of mass market MPEG-2 recording.
As others have mentioned the original Dish Players had rudimentary recording before TiVo. They've been MPEG-2/DVB since inception.
4) 30-sec skip, wish lists, filters, etc. might be considered standard now but when Tivo implemented them, they were revolutionary to the TV market and pre-digital TV.
There were some VCR's on the market with a 30-second skip button.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It doesn't matter who's on each side of the argument - but any outcome in favor of a software patent is bad. Very bad.
You are absolutely wrong about no downloadable program guide before TiVo.
There were both StarSight and VideoGuide, both sold in the mid 1990s before TiVo.
VideoGuide actually had a nice GUI interface with a comfortable simple remote. Except for the limitations of Tape (no random access, no way to delete shows or know what was on which tape), it was quite comparable to TiVo. It downloaded program guide data via a wireless interface (based on a pager network). You could buy the units at any RadioShack.
Do you not see a huge qualitative difference between what you just discribed and a tool that lets you schedule television shows to record (by name), records them, manages their deletion, and let's you view them while simultaneously providing a nice 30 minute buffer on live TV?
This is like saying the mechanisms of a specific electronic calculator shouldn't be patented because man had already invented the abacus.
I really hope they start selling a service though: Remote control design for dummies. The Tivo remote is just so damn nice compared to the crap Comcast is hoisting on me.
I disagree and believe that Tivo did innovate and does deserve patent protection.
Tivo may well have thought innovatively, and be a great company -- but remember, you can't patent great ideas, and that's what exactly most of what you describe sounds like.
If they had a sufficiently non-obvious mechanism to implement some of their great ideas, they could patent the mechanism, but anybody else is quite free to come along and use a different method with the same result. Even if Tivo thought of it first.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
They exist for protecting new and nonobvious inventions.
Recording and playing back video at the same time from the same hard dirve was both new and non-obvious when they filed the patent. I don't know why it's so hard for you to see that. There were plenty of experts in the field... People who made non-linear digital editing stations, etc... None of those people thought of it. There are other people who were making DVRs at the time, Echostar for example, and they didn't think of it until they had a Tivo to play with (their DVR could only play back when it wasn't recording).
How does that not qualify as non-obvious? What does qualify as non obvious to you? Not only wasn't it obvious that it was possible, but it wasn't obvious that you'd want to do it, until somebody did.
Or maybe you should have patented it?
You said it yourself. TIVO made a product that was cheaper, more available, smaller, more robust feature-wise, and did on-the-fly video work. Just because ENIAC was a machine that added numbers together doesn't mean that you can use it to invalidate all computer patents since then.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/