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."

Comments

Not so fast

[Itsallmyfault]

As I understand it, Dish Networks has pushed upgrades to their units, resolving any infringment issues. Deactivating DVRs isn't on the table.

ST:DVR

[Anonymous Coward]

"Multimedia time warping"? What's this, Captain Picard's DVR?

MPEG Streams Only?

[JustinRLynn]

The patent specifically mentions conversion to and manipulation of the incoming signal via an MPEG formatted stream. Does this mean that devices that use another format for manipulating the streams, say Ogg/Vorbis/Theora, would not be infringing?

TiVO's just mad cause their patent is defunct....

[GuyverDH]

Tivo's patent is for analog to digital conversion / time warping.

Dish's patent is for digital to digital (different digital formats) conversion / time warping.

Guess which broadcast standard is going away.... =)

Re:the jury

[Kjella]

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. On the other hand Tivo is hardly a patent troll with no business, they have a very real product that has probably lost a lot of money to competitiors infringing on the patent. Nor has it really been a secret that Tivo has been holding these patents in the DVR market. What is outragous are the companies that never have and never will make anything based on a patent, but simply wait around to sue someone out of nowhere. Dish is hardly noobs, they have lawyers and if they've failed to come up with prior art ot fail the obviousness criteria then perhaps Tivo actually has been innovative? I'm really not too concerned with patent cases where the patent holder has actually used the patent and made a product that someone else is trying to shamelessly copy. Right now it's a "sunk innovation", Tivo has made the innovation and now they're reaping the benefits, but that kind of money is also motivation for someone to find a different way of doing things. It's very tempting to have your cake (have someone invest to make an innovation) and eat it too (let everyone copy it so you don't pay a premium) but it doesn't quite add up.