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

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-skip-for-you dept.

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."

9 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Patent good in this case by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    1. Re:Patent good in this case by durrr · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Patent good in this case by sound+vision · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Patent good in this case by blind+biker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  2. Next by GrahamCox · · Score: 5, Funny

    Next they'll be patenting eye clamps so you can't shut your eyes and a tongue strap so you can't go "la la la la la" during the commercials.

    Peole.Do.Not.Want.To.Watch.Ads.

    Find another way to make money, you morons.

  3. they missed a patent by fish+waffle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:they missed a patent by Phrogman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
  4. in lay terms by mug+funky · · Score: 5, Interesting

    this munges up the keyframes (I frames) in a stream when it detects a cue embedded by the network (ADS START HERE!!1!). therefore, if a device is designed to fast-forward by skipping over the predicted (P and B) frames, it cannot do this as it can't find the I frames needed to display anything at all.

    this will fail on sane devices because fast-forward is usually implemented as skipping just the B-frames (that are predicted off both I and P frames), while decoding the I frames and P frames.

    this will further fail because MPEG-2 decoders are fast enough that they can decode the stream in it's entirety fast enough for a practical fast-forward (my 5 yo computer can do it on CPU only, 1 core only at about 200fps).

    this will fail even further because a trivial firmware hack could detect this "cue tone" and skip the ads _entirely_. they're basically implanting a trivially readable signal that usefully tells us what are the ads and what is the show.

    1. Re:in lay terms by pipedwho · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.)