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TiVo Time Warp Judgment Affirmed

Posted by timothy on from the when-patents-beat-sense dept.

zapakh writes "A federal appeals court this week upheld a lower court decision that accused DISH Network and EchoStar of continuing to infringe on TiVo patents.' This is a follow-on to a Slashdot story from October. Despite a 'Herculean effort' by EchoStar in redesigning its DVR software, the ruling agrees with the district court that that was not a major redesign of the software. The patent in question is titled 'Multimedia time warping system.' TiVo is pleased with the ruling."

3 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Does mythtv by Colin+Smith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Automatically search the listings and record stuff I might like? It didn't the last time I looked.

     

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  2. Re:MPEG by russotto · · Score: 2, Interesting

    With all those references to MPEG in the patent, couldn't they simply use Ogg Theora (or some other codec) to circumvent the patent?

    Probably not as a practical matter. For ATSC (and DVB), the stream comes in as MPEG, which would mean you'd have to transcode to use another codec.

    Interestingly, MythTV doesn't seem to infringe this patent. The essential claims have steps where the streams are disassembled into video and audio, stored, and re-assembled on playback. MythTV doesn't work this way; it stores the program streams with the video and audio still interleaved, and disassembles on playback. I'm not sure why EchoStar couldn't use a similar technique; unfortunately, it's possible that the courts interpret the patent broadly and figure that difference doesn't matter.

  3. To anyone who thinks this is trivial by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 2, Interesting

    To anyone who thinks TiVo's patent is trivial: go read it.

    Implementing simultaneous recording and playback, with quick seeking to any point in the stream, and doing so with a very low-cost system (in TiVo's case, originally a 50MHz PowerPC) is not at all trivial.

    There's more than one way to implement such functionality in hardware, but TiVo found a way that was cheap and effective before Echostar did, and Echostar didn't bother to license TiVo's patent or find another method.