Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

TiVo vs EchoStar - TiVo Wins

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the set-top-battles dept.

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.'"

2 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Expected outcome, also expected to be appealed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    You're spewing FUD.

    It's routine to "investigate" patents when they come under dispute in legal cases, so whatever the US Patent office is doing does not mean squat unless they actually invalidate TiVo's patents, which is extremely unlikely.

    As for being reversed on appeal, that is unlikely as well. If you have been following the case you will realize how solid TiVo's case is. There are no weak points that are going to make a reversal on appeal likely.

    As for your talk about who has "deep pockets": that's more bullshit FUD. TiVo has more than enough money to fight this case on appeal as far as Echostar wants to take it.

    TiVo picked this patent fight with Echostar because it was an open and shut case: Echostar was by far the easiest target and most flagrant violator of TiVo's patents to go after. TiVo was smart: they didn't sue everyone in sight who were arguably violating their patents, they waited until they had the closest thing they could get to the perfect case.

    Echostar has lost, will lose, will continue to lose, until they are finally forced to face reality.

  2. Just Another Stupid Patent by KidSock · · Score: 0, Troll

    I know a lot of ./'ers like their Tivos and all but this is just another stupid patent that should be rejected. If Tivo dies because of competition then sorry but that's irrelivant. Patents aren't a crutch for weak business models. They're supposed to give an inventor time to develop and deliver their product (and that's if it's NOT Just Another Stupid Patent). Providing a service to schedule recording TV shows to a hard drive is mildly innovative but it is not a "eureka" moment, it's just bundling. You could record a show to magnetic tape at a certain time with a run-of-the-mill VCR.