TiVo Wins Permanent Injunction Against EchoStar

ZenFodderBoy writes "It's official! Judge Folsom entered his ruling today granting TiVo nearly $90 million in damages, plus granting a permanent injunction calling for the disabling of nearly all of EchoStar's DVRs within the next 30 days. EchoStar's motion to stay the injunction pending appeal was denied. Additionally, the judge reserves the right to grant additional damages in the future, so treble damages may still be coming. Excellent news for TiVo!"

Comments

/. is an editorial factory

[Anonymous Coward]

"Excellent news for TiVo!" Bad news for consumers.

Re:/. is an editorial factory

[ImTheDarkcyde]

definately, do you have any idea i spent on that DVR?

Re:/. is an editorial factory

[squiggleslash]

Well, you may think it's great news that your 625 will be disabled within a month, I, personally, am not looking forward to it.

In all honesty, the DVR feature is the only thing that's made TV service usable as far as I'm concerned. Barely anything we watch is live, and pretty much everything we record is recorded at times we're not around. Speculation that "EchoStar might buy TiVo" strikes me as premature, and doesn't exactly help during the period our bought and paid for hardware ceases to support advertised critical functionality.

And, personally, I'm having difficulty accepting anything that's in the 625 should be patentable. Once you've thinking in terms of a device that automatically stores programs selected from a TV schedule, pretty much everything else the 625 does follows. But whether it is or it isn't, I'm pissed about the consequences of this. Choices have just been limited. People who have bought service and signed into 18 month contracts are being screwed. Whether it's EchoStar or a combination of TiVo and the current patent system that's to blame, this isn't fair, and we are all worse off for it.

Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for posting some links to the background of this story and for the detailed introduction and background that you added to your entry and for not just linking to another blog entry elsewhere on the...

Oh wait.

This won't be good for tivo in the long run

[Anonymous Coward]

He who lives by the submarine patent claim dies by the submarine patent claim...

Tivo's time will come.

Re:This won't be good for tivo in the long run

[blakestah]

The patents were neither obvious or easy at the time of the patent application. Hardware was so slow back then that video encoding and playback from hard drives were difficult. Today, everything is 10 times faster, so it is easy to think of it as trivial. But you need to think of it in terms of what was available in 1997.

That brings up somewhat obvious questions about the applicability and utility of our patent system. TiVO patented something in 1997 that was novel and non-obvious. However, it would have been both obvious and easy 5 years later. So, they get 17 years of monopoly for being ahead of their time.

I dig it though, I have friends who work there, and they could use the money...

Re:This won't be good for tivo in the long run

[Secrity]

The technology behind most useful patents becomes obvious and easy five years after being patented. Part of it is normal advancement of technology, much of it is because the patent system requires that the technology be disclosed to the public, and in many cases it is because products using the technology become readily available on the market. It is sort of like good magic - the trick is a mystery until somebody puts up a webpage telling how the trick is done.

Re:Win for Tivo - Lose for Customers

[sessamoid]

Dish Network owns EchoStar. Does this mean all the Dish customers are screwed as well? I'm all for justice, but disabling all the existing customer's devices seems a bit overkill to me. -Aaron

That's exactly it means. Nearly all of their DVR's must be rendered essentially useless within 30 days unless Echostar can negotiate a licensing deal with Tivo. Though the judge didn't find that Echostar acted in bad faith, what I've followed of their various lawsuits leads me to disagree. Maybe not to the letter of the law, but it seemed to me that they were essentially using the expensive and lengthy legal process to try to bully a smaller and more innovative competitor out of existence by bankrupting them with legal costs and starving them of market share.

IMHO, Echostar got what they deserved. It's a shame their customers may have to suffer for it, but that's the price of protecting the inventors.

Re:Stock?

[KokorHekkus]

I'm more concerned about what this means for projects like MythTV...

If MythTV or some other project gets targeted by stuff like this there will always be ways around it. Modularize the system enough to have the major apps hosted in the US (where the problem is). Host rest of prohibited modules where the rest of the world can enjoy them... different game, same tactics as the brightly conceived crypto export regulations

Of course this would be a setback for the projects but it wouldn't be enough to kill them.

The Point

[sahrss]

Isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that all of these customers who BOUGHT this item, can now have it disabled remotely? That's what makes this story interesting to me. Remind me to never buy something that can be taken from me...remotely.

Re:This is about Patents

[Lussarn]

From what I understand the patent infrigement is on tivos "Time warping system", which I if I understand it correctly is "pause and rewind live TV" as well as "record one show while watching another".

Basically the number one claim seems to be on seeking in an open file if the file is a multimedia stream. In Linux language:

cat /dev/video0 >/tmp/in0.mpg
mplayer /tmp/in0.mpg

Those two lines would instantly infringe on tivos patent.
The next claim is even fruitier.

cat /dev/video0 >/tmp/in0.mpg
cat /dev/video1 >/tmp/in1.mpg
mplayer /tmp/in1.mpg


I have a hard time beliving tivo actully did this first, and even if they did where is the invention. When I first got a TV card a couple of years ago this is what I did because it was the easiest way to get the media to play. Needless to say, but I didn't feel like I invented something. Maybe I missed something about tivos patent, I'm not a lawyer.

Re:This will do nothing but harm the consumer &

[Monoman]

Fuck tivo.

A little misdirected anger?

Maybe you have some other reason to be pissed at Tivo. Don't be mad at Tivo becuase Echostar sold you something they stole from Tivo and got caught.

Re:A stupid judgment that penalises customers...

[Eric S. Smith]

A patent should not imply that one single company has exclusive rights to implement, sell and support products based out of the said patent.

Patents don't imply that, they are that. But I agree that you're quite right about the injustice of the injunction, and about the most obvious way of settling the matter without injuring third parties.

In the software realm, if, to pick an example close to the hearts of many in the legal profession, WordPerfect were suddenly found to have violated a patent, would it be appropriate to disable all copies of WordPerfect and force users to purchase another product, just so that they could read from and write to their existing files? And how could such users determine that the product they'd been forced to buy wouldn't in turn have a self-destruct injunction filed against it next month?

Re:This will do nothing but harm the consumer &

[laird]

The ruling didn't say that Echostar had to kill all of their DVR's. The ruling said that Echostar had 30 days to negotiate a licensing arrangement with TiVo. TiVo has some great leverage in the negotiations, but that's because Echostar refused to negotiate previously, preferring to play "hard ball" in court, and lost.

This is, by the way, how basic patents work. There's no "it's popular, so you don't have to pay to license the patent" rule. For example, Motorolla has a patent on putting a heat sink on a transistor, and every other electronics company pays them for it. There's an engineer that has the patent on on-screen programmable VCR's, and he gets paid for every single VCR manufactured. The way the world works, that engineer doesn't have a monopoly on on-screen programmable VCR's, but every VCR manufacturer has to negotiate a license before they can (legally) ship their product.

This won't affect Echostar customers, or technical support representatives, unless Echostar decides that they'd rather screw their customers than cut a deal with TiVo. At that point, resigning is a reasonable course of action.

Re:Dish to Disable DVRs ?

[Phreakiture]

This would not be a first time for Dish.

The Dish Network management knows how to use their customers as leverage. Every time there is a contract dispute between a program provider and Dish, they make sure that it is clear to the customer how to contact that program provider and pitch a bitch.

I would be surprised if a similar tactic didn't get applied here.

Re:A stupid judgment that penalises customers...

[aeryn_sunn]

Actually, the judgment is not so stupid but has a valid point. Echostar lost the trial and Tivo was awarded damages (we know this)... Echostar does not want to pay, for obvious reasons, and thinks it can either get the verdict overturned on appeal or perhaps get the patents invalidated, but in the meantime Echostar would like to still engage in patent infringement (remember, the jury found that Echostar was guilty)... As Patent law permits, Tivo filed an injuction to stop Echostar's patent infringement,which was reasonably granted... reasonably because Echostar could not convince the court to allow them to continue to infringe the patent while awaiting appeal, which could take years...

The injunction gives bite to the verdict... now Echostar has to either pay up what the verdict says...or work on a settlement agreement... of course, it still can and will appeal, but in the meantime, it cannot continue to infringe Tivo's patent... else, without an injuction option, a guilty verdict in any patent infringement trial would be meaningless if the infringer could continue to well, infringe...

neither the medicinal drug nor another poster's Wordperfect scenarios are pertinent analogies... medicine already ingested is obviously not the same as a service provided by a company... the drug company has no more rights in the sold drugs... if anything, an injunction would prohibit such an infringer from producing and selling any more drugs, but of course, whether a court would order an injunction against a drug company producing a drug, a court would consider other factors in that type of scenario, such as whether the drug is taken for life/health threatening reasons (a cancer drug vs. an erection drug)...and whether there are alternative sources for similar drugs (the actual patent holder produces the drug)...

remember, Echostar's dvr is a service...the customer does not own the dvr software, Echostar does... so the injuction prevents them from continuing their patent infringing service... customers may suffer (although, what do they really suffer? nothing life/health threatening, unless missing Laguna Beach or another retarded episode of The Hills would create mind crushing depression leading to a surge of bulemia among silly girls), but that is Echostar's fault, not Tivo's...

So, the judgment is not stupid...its a tool to enforce the verdict and stop a convicted infringer from continuing their illegal activity