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

Re:Win for Tivo - Lose for Customers

[RESPAWN]

It's a shame that millions of Echostar customers will now have non-functional DVR boxes, which they paid for?

Let's see if we can draw a similar, hypothetical example to the Linux world. Say, Microsoft sues KDE(or whatever your favorite window manager may be) and wins an injunction against KDE because KDE is infringing on their patent for, say, displaying multiple windows on the screen at the same time. In 30 days, KDE has to disable every version of KDE installed via their patch updating system. How pissed would you be? Now think about how pissed you would be if you had paid for KDE. How is this at all fair to KDE since there are dozens of other similar systems with the exact same funtionality on the market and how is KDE to compete without the ability to do the same?

After looking a little further into the case I don't disagree that Echostar should pay for some of their dirty tacts. Pay monetarily, that is. But to issue an injunction against what is an obvious process that has been implemented on dozens of other competitor devices is tantamount to a death sentence for Echostar.

To champion a piece of technology or a particular company you like, is one thing. To support such an obviously absurd judicial decision just because you like a company is another thing. Like Tivo or not, this decision is just another case of a ridiculous patent that should never have been granted now being used for litigation purposes.

Re:Dish to Disable DVRs ?

[silas_moeckel]

I do beleive thats the point of the order, Dish has 30 days to give tivo a pile of cash to Lic there DVR's or get sued into bankrupsy (how do you reposess a satalite anyway :) the 90mill is a rather minimal slap on the wrist, now they have to go into contract negotiations. Maybe you guys will see an improvement as Dish gets real Tivo's to replace all those DVR's out there, meaning networked HME enabled tivo's.

As a side note when is somebody going to come up with cablecard for satalite?

A hacked direct tivo user switching to cable when Series 3's come out.

Re:TiVo has gone the way of the new SCO

[GuyverDH]

All right, so they've added this feature then.

A little over a year ago when I looked into it, they didn't.