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TiVO Patent Upheld, Dish May Have to Disable DVR
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a ruling by a lower court that Dish Network DVRs infringe upon TiVO's patent on a 'multimedia time warping system'. According to some analysts, this could not only make Dish liable for damages, it could force them to shut down their DVR service, harming their customers. The patent in question has already been reexamined once and the ruling on appeal (PDF) was unanimous."
The jury awarded TiVo $73 911 964 in damages. No wonder there are patent-trolls roaming about, with this kind of money being tossed around.
Also, DVR permits you to watch the program while taping it, in a way that allows you to "pause" it and continue later. This ability is included in TiVO's patent. There's no way to do this with a VCR, so it doesn't count as previous art for it.
Sounds a lot like "instant replay," the ability to pause, rewind and fast forward a live broadcast. They've been doing in sports broadcasts since the 60s. Using fancy video tape decks -"VCRs" if you will.
I wonder too - as others have - what the implications are for having mythtv or some other free pvr.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Are you kidding? Tivo is pretty much screwed at this point because most people are content (happy is too strong a word - have you SEEN an Explorer 8300!?) with the crappy DVRs their cable/satellite providers now give them.
They NEVER "got plenty of money" - I don't believe they have had more than a couple profitable quarters in 10 years (and those were probably due to lawsuits!)
Their only hope of survival at this point is to protect their patents (that probably still have a good 7-8 years left). Patents that seem to be violated by most of the other DVRs. They are just going after Dish because DirecTV still has Tivo DVRs in service, they made a deal with Comcast (which uses Motorola), and Time Warner uses Scientific Atlanta which is a stretch to call it a DVR ("piece of crap" is a better term).
The idea is not that no one else can make DVRs - it's that Tivo gets more money from Echostar. They only have to stop selling DVRs if they are not willing to come to an agreement. Though Echostar is the kind of company that is happy to screw over it's customers and blame someone else just to be cheap.
I'm curious to see if I get flamed for this, but I'm going to say that on some philosophical level, Tivo should win this.
I've been very critical of patents in the past, and in general I think they are overused by trolls and big corps to squash competition on obvious ideas. But most people admit that somewhere underneath all that crap is the ideal of a little guy being able to spend a bunch of time and money to invent and bring something to market without having someone else immediately copy them and usurp the benefits of all their hard work. There's a valid, society benefitting reason for patents, it's just that they're almost never used in that way these days any more.
I think Tivo is an example of what patents should protect. My understanding is that Tivo was a pretty clever idea, and they spent a lot of time and money creating something very cool and unique. I never owned one myself, but friends did, and it seemed to me that if anything was patentable it would be Tivo. I was later a bit weirded out when all these competing DVRs appeared. In fact I took it to mean that the patent system was broken in both directions: it encouraged patent trolling over obvious ideas and it failed to protect inventors.
Now I hear that they may be getting patent protection after all, and for the first time since Dyson protected himself against the vacuum manufacturers that refused to license his work, I'm seeing patents do what they were meant to do: encourage actual invention.
If you think Tivo was not worthy of a patent, then I don't know what to tell you. It's not just a VCR, and if it were people would be including VCRs in cable boxes. They came up with something cool that nobody else was doing, and if I understand the market at the time, something nobody else wanted to do. And before they could turn a profit they were slammed by knockoffs from several sides.
Anyways: I just want to call out that while I generally gag at the patent cases I see, this is not one of them. I think Tivo brought something unique to market and they should have a (truly) limited time to exclusively benefit from it.
Cheers.
This case is actually a textbook example of why patents exist. TiVo came up with a novel, innovative product and basically created the market for DVRs. Dish copies the idea, having to invest much less into R&D because they can just do what TiVo does, bundles it with their service so they can cut TiVo out of the market. TiVo is different from a patent troll because TiVo was actively developing and selling products based on the technology and were actually harmed by Dish's violation of their rights.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
Bullshit. TiVO came up with a deadly obvious invention and managed to patent it first.
I had the concept behind TiVO years ago when digital video first started becoming available. It's an obvious idea that anyone who's worked with UNIX pipes could have thought of. TiVO is just more for video.
What stopped people from doing it before TiVO is the same thing that made TiVO ridiculously expensive at first: technology. Hard drives simply weren't big enough to make recording TV to disk a reasonable home application.
When that changed, we got TiVO. Now that technology has improved even further, we've got HD DVRs that can record up to something ridiculous like 50 hours of HD programming.
But the concept is simple. The idea was never novel, it's just assembling a bunch of off-the-shelf parts together. It's why TiVO is dieing - they may have been first to market, but they entered the market before technology had really caught up far enough to make DVRs cheaply.
This means that while they can nail Dish network for patent violation, they themselves have committed a copyright violation and opened themselves up to lawsuits from thousands of developers.
Yes that is the same tired response from someone who has never done the hard work, invested every penny they had and borrowed money from their family to bring a product to market, just to see it jumped on by 18 knock off shops and never see a penny for all their hard work. Yes there are things broken in both Patent and Copyright law, I certainly agree with that. But to hear someone like you blather on about the evils of patent and copyright just sickens me.
I know someone who put himself through school to get a phd in optical design and spent every waking moment writing a better piece of optical design software. His software did 95% of what the major players in the optical design market did for 10% of the price. He published version 1.0 and before he knew it there were pirate copies showing up all over the place. Version 1.01 came along with a DONGOL to protect his Intellectual Property. The software is well into version 10, years later and it still comes with a DONGOL.
Here is your clue... Beer is not free, Freedom is not free, Food is not free, School is not free, Electricity is not free... Get it, NOTHING is free. Take down all the structures we have, no technology, no internal combustion engines, no silicon wafers, no steel mills, nothing, and life is not free. You have to work hard every damn day to survive. The people who invent deserve the fruits of their labor, the people who create great works of art deserver the fruits of their labor, the people who create great software deserve the fruits of their labor.
So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
No difference. What does technology have to do with the market in which it exists other than catering to it.
Regardless. It's a bullshit patent. I've been doing that crap with VCR's years before TiVo albeit it was neither this pretty nor flexible. Digital format simply offers new advantages in terms of application, speed, and cost but to patent recording 2 programs at once or recording one and watching another? What kind of crap is that? It's not even an idea, it goddamn obvious.
Live TV has nothing to do with it, it is never live, it's a case of a AV feed source being digitally saved to a HDD, then opened and - in this case - played back. All a DVR does is access stored files from different processes. My computer does this all the time. It is doing it right now. What will they claim next, that they invented shared file access?
The individuals who do the actual inventing rarely make much money. It is the people who market the inventions and get ownership of the intellectual property rights who typically end up with most of the money. Any lawyer can confirm this. Sad but true. The few inventors with the savvy and resources to fight off the charlatans and their lawyers and reap the fruits of their labors are a rare breed, and are becoming ever ever rarer with each passing day.
I have not read the patent, but I wonder if they are claiming recording one program and watching that same program (time shifted) at the same time. That would make sense in the context of TiVO. If so, I don't think any consumer devices can be used as prior art, although there are almost certainly pro devices that allow footage to be edited while it is being imported.
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I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Its a bullshit patent. Ive been doing that crap with VCRs years before TiVo
No, you havent. There has never been a VCR that allows you to rewind and watch from the beginning at the same time recording continues. Tapes cant, and dont, work that way. Instant replay in sports involved (I dont know the specifics) multiple machines and some coordinated efforts by the broadcast team.
All a DVR does is access stored files from different processes. My computer does this all the time
TiVos patents include a very specific method for processing and laying down the data so that you can get DVR functionality with a low-powered processor and a slow hard drive. And do it without pausing or stuttering or losing audio sync. When you throw a dual core processor, a gigabyte of RAM, and a 7200 rpm SATA drive at the problem, there are a lot of ways to do this without infringing on TiVos patents.
My computer does this all the time. It is doing it right now
I doubt it. Your machine may be pulling files off the hard drive, but to compare that to what a TiVo does is disingenuous at best.
"200 Quatloos on the newcomer!" "300 Quatloos against!"
So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor.
No thanks. I'll work because I love doing it and because I want to make the world a better place. The people who invent deserve the fruits of their labor, the people who create great works of art deserver the fruits of their labor, the people who create great software deserve the fruits of their labor. Perhaps so, but if that's your goal, we know that the current patent and copyright laws will not accomplish it. The current system is just a crap shoot, albeit heavily weighted towards those who (a) have a lot of money, (b) want to make a lot of money, and (c) are willing to spend a considerable amount of time gaming the system rather than being creative."Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Yes but for patent purposed... is there a difference whether the mechanism for doing so was in the studio or in your home? If it's just miniaturization and aggregation of a process already in place, conveniently packaged at a price point for consumers, does it count as new and non-obvious?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
What I don't understand is this: how could the courts possibly uphold a patent that has so much prior art?
So basically, TiVo made trivial incremental improvements to a basic concept that had been used for decades whose sole enhancement of consequence is its intended use, and now has a patent that can hold the entire rest of the TV electronics industry hostage. This is a prime example of why patents need to be abolished, or at minimum, dramatically restricted in terms of breadth, what they can cover, and duration. This is basically a patent on using a fork as a backscratcher, and should be thrown out as utterly absurd in any rational universe.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.