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: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.

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 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 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.