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

[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.

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: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.)