Time Warner Cable Patents Method For Disabling Fast-Forward Function On DVRs

antdude writes in with a story about a patent that won't have DVR users skipping for joy. "Time Warner Cable has won a U.S. patent for a method for disabling fast-forward and other trick mode functions on digital video recorders. The patent, which lists Time Warner Cable principal architect Charles Hasek as the inventor, details how the nation's second largest cable MSO may be able prevent viewers from skipping TV commercials contained in programs stored on physical DVRs it deploys in subscriber homes, network-based DVRs and even recording devices subscribers purchase at retail outlets."

Comments

Patent good in this case

[DNS-and-BIND]

At least the damage will be restricted to one company, albeit a major one.

Re:Patent good in this case

[durrr]

For those who don't want to read technical details it can be summarized like this: Time Warner patents yet another "Method to create disincentives to honest buyers and drive people into piracy"

I'm sure it will be a great sucess and useful as yet another argument why pirates kill their business.

Re:Patent good in this case

[Zuriel]

You're overlooking the other major upside to this patent: technical details will be available to MythTV's developers and added to the commercial skipper.

Re:Patent good in this case

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is this just an unbelievably bad idea, or do I not understand it properly?

It would seem that, to function as a video playback device, The cable box/DVR would have to have enough data to reconstruct every frame in the program, at or before the time it needs to be displayed. Whether you only need a few frames in order to compute frame N, because of fairly frequent i-frames, or whether you need every frame before N to compute N, the DVR can still compute each frame, and so skip anywhere it wants(unless, of course, it was physically unplugged/off/not getting a usable signal, I'm sure customers with flaky reception are going to love having minutes of artifacts after every dip...

Re:Patent good in this case

[nurb432]

You really think so? You are sadly mistaken, as others will license it too. Its not like it comes out of their pocket, they just pass the cost along down to your bill.

Re:Patent good in this case

[skine]

Their business is showing advertisements to as many people as possible.

Entertainment is only the method they use.

Re:Patent good in this case

[tompaulco]

Their business is showing advertisements to as many people as possible. Entertainment is only the method they use.
The networks business model is showing advertisements to customers. The cable companies business model is providing content to customers. We pay them to give us content without commercials, otherwise we could just get an antenna.

Re:Patent good in this case

[sound vision]

Well no, their business isn't solely ads. They also collect subscription fees, so some of the money actually does come from people paying for entertainment.
That being said ... it'd be interesting to find out what proportion of their money comes from subscribers, and what comes from advertisers.

Re:Patent good in this case

[blind biker]

For those who don't want to read technical details it can be summarized like this: Time Warner patents yet another "Method to create disincentives to honest buyers and drive people into piracy"

I'm sure it will be a great sucess and useful as yet another argument why pirates kill their business.

Piracy is copying copyrighted content with the intent of making a profit. If one copies such content for their own pleasure but not profit, then it's just... copying. There is such a nice word for it, why not use it? Let me repeat: copying.

Re:Patent good in this case

[ormico]

I can't help thinking this is beating a dead horse. Isn't it fair to say that the market is moving away from DVRs and towards streaming on demand.

I used to have a Tivo. And then when I had Dish for a year, I had their DVR, but that was years ago. We dropped Cable TV and kept Cabled Internet. We watch everything we care about on Netflix or Amazon over our XBox or one one of our laptops.

I know not everyone does that, but it seems to be the way things are headed.

Making DVRs less useful is just going to drive that trend quicker.

Re:Patent good in this case

[Anonymous Coward]

Piracy is copying copyrighted content with the intent of making a profit

No it bloody isn't! Piracy is having a wooden leg, eye patch and parrot and stealing boats, people and treasure on the high seas.

I'm pretty certain the terms you are looking are along the lines of 'copyright infringement' and 'counterfeiting'.

Re:Patent good in this case

[kurkosdr]

"Because implementing the same system in other TV service would need licensing which would be money which would be skippable then. Time Warner customers are boned, but hey, better for the rest of us" Tee hee... This is where the DMCA comes to play: Are you a company that makes DVRs/DVD recorders, and want your DVRs/DVD recorders to be able to work with Time Warner cable cards? We have a little contract you must sign. If you go ahead and provide compatibility with Time Warner cable cards without Time Warner's permission, it will be considered "circumvention" and the wrath of the US "justice system" will be onto you. See how the DVD Forum mandates CGMS-A detection in DVD recorders, and region lock, UOPs and CGMS-A+Macrovision output on DVD players for more info. Unless some company/startup gets the balls and releases a libdvdcss DVD player in the US, so that a precedent of using "circumvention" for at least the purpose of viewing is enstablished, the landscape will be divided between the "free world" that has to pirate and the "stupid restrictions world" that has authorized access to media. What surprises me is how little mention the EFF, Wikipedia and other organizations that supposedly care about user freedoms make about this. They 'll bang on about censorship and net neutrality, but when it comes to the fact you have to tolerate weird restrictions on legally purchased material, utter silence or very few mentions.

This is a great patent...

[__Paul__]

...and I'll make sure to avoid any device that lists it in its manual.

they missed a patent

[fish waffle]

They forgot to patent "driving legitimate users to bittorrent through adding techniques designed to irritate paying customers".

But I suppose there's lots of prior art there.

Re:they missed a patent

[Phrogman]

Yeah, every move they make in this industry just seems to point out that a bittorrented version of whatever it is you are watching is preferable to the commercial product.
When the industry gets it right - say with Netflix (or the new BBC app my wife is using on her iPad), people are perfectly willing to pay for the service. When they get it wrong with crap like this, people will not be willing to just bend over and take it.

Re:Waiiiiit a minute... Huh?

[Eponymous Hero]

the only appropriate response to time warner cable is FUCK YOU. some of us will be saying it with our money, but it would be nice to see someone get this point across in some tangible way.

d|i|g|i|t|a|l

[sdo1]

I do not think d|i|g|i|t|a|l means what you think it means...

Re:Next

[TheGratefulNet]

already they have doubled rates (at some point, they were half, right?) and yet we still have crap on the networks.

so, your theory is BS. no matter how much we'd pay, they would STILL want to dip further into ad money. movies were once ad-free and pay-tv was once ad-free. none of that is, anymore.

I have zero hope in people Doing The Right Thing(tm) when it comes to us paying and getting ad-free services. so, I pirate, you pirate we all pirate. its what they have forced us to do. their fault. fully their fault for the war on eyeballs and eardrums.

they want war? they'll have it. and they'll lose.

btw, someone said there was a DEC logo here. I didn't see it, as it turned out I had many images blocked. I went to an 'unblocked' browser and was amazed at how BAD slash was when unfiltered. running firefox with noscript and adlock and a hefty filter list, I had totally forgotton how BAD the raw internet had become. and so, there is yet another proof that if there is an opp. the farking bastards will seize any free space and try to put an ad up there.

no more commercial tv, no more dvd's that have not been ripped and edited, no more unfiltered ad-laden internet. they WILL NOT GET MY EYEBALLS. fuckers!

There is nothing on TV you need, keep your money.

[couchslug]

Don't like their business practices? Stop giving them money.

Re:in lay terms

[pipedwho]

As obvious it seems to be able to work around this, it still irks me that somehow this method was considered non-obvious and novel by the patent office and granted patent protection.

The point of patents is theoretically to advance the state of the art. This type of patent is in no way clever, or anything that couldn't have been thought up by anyone working in that field (and by quite a few people not skilled in the field of video compression and transport). Yes, I agree that in detail it may not "have been done before" and thus not subject to prior art, but the "obviousness" clause is meant to protect the patent pool from accumulating with patents that do nothing but hinder progress. ie. If a patent doesn't provide useful non-obvious information (or information that wouldn't naturally be derived with a trivial amount of calculation or tinkering), then allowing it to be used to extort others that come up with a similar or the same concepts can only harm an industry as a whole.

That being said, I'm pretty sure there isn't a single person on Slashdot who wouldn't celebrate any injunctory action taken by the holder of this particular patent. But, IMO, the patent should have never been granted in the first place. (Which is also true for far too many patents that are granted these days.)

Wrong approach

[gr8_phk]

If people would just get an ANTENNA and drop cable TV we'd have:
1) TV would cost nothing
2) All TV would be HD - there haven't been analog broadcasts for years now.
3) With limited channels there would be competition among shows and mostly good stuff would be on all channels
There is more local programming than you think with sub-channels on DTV. We only need to take this approach in the city to have a positive effect - that's where most the viewers are.

Re:Next

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think most people mind a few ads. Its just that the sheer quantity of ads has been increasing dramatically. Back in 1966, Star Trek (TOS) had approximately 8 minutes of commercials per hour. In 2004, episodes of Star Trek Enterprise had jumped to over 22 minutes of commercials per hour. That's almost tripled in less than 40 years. www.waynesthisandthat.com/commerciallength.htm

If you take into account in show product placement this inflates to 43+ minutes per hour for some shows (Hell's Kitchen). www.marketingcharts.com/television/primetime-tv-hour-includes-41-commercials-9434/