Apparently by requiring that U.S. citizens e above the law. I'm not kidding here, this is precisely what the U.S. position was: War crime tribunal? Ok, if we're immune.
Read what I said again. Read what you said again... Notice how they're pretty much the same?
That's not because of "politically motivated blahblablah", that's a clear "we intend to commit warcrimes, but we don't mind if no one else is allowed to".
Wrong. That's a "We've done this stuff already, and we're not putting those guys in jail". Regardless, they're not warcrimes until the treaty goes into effect. We're allowed to have a different idea as to what constitutes a war crime right up to the point where a coalition of foreign militaries rolls their tanks into Washington DC to arrest our elected leaders.
As far as I'm concerned, however, sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to have a double standard.
I think it's less obvious than you think, because it's a harder problem than you seem to understand. All the examples you gave were linear. Random makes the problem much more difficult, and the performance of the device much, much lower. Let's put it this way: It seems it's not obvious to you how non-trivial of a problem it is. You, however, picked exactly the wrong person to accuse of not being an expert in the field, since I make my living as a low-level storage driver and performance engineer.
I've done crazy stuff with hard drives. I've written journaling code that precicely times the rotation of the disk so you can optimize your scheduling to write to the sector that is on it's way by the head and avoid the rotational latency. (The hard part there is figuring out exactly how fast your disk is spinning with enough accuracy... 15,000 RPM plus or minus 2% makes it tricky). If you're doing something like a tape delay, or playback during recording, you can do many thousands of IOPS on even the crappyiest of low end drives if you're clever. Want random access? You're down in the very low hundreds or double digits unless you pull some fancy, decidedly non-obvious tricks.
People who think what a Tivo did with what was available at the time really don't have an appreciation for how non-trivial it is to squeeze performance out of a rotational disk, and how much work went into your OS of choice to make the performance only kinda suck. It's not beyond the realm of comprehension for an expert, but that's a far cry from obvious. Hell, the only reason it works with things like MythTV without jumping through hoops is because computers have so much memory for cache in them these days.
I guarantee you that the first words out of every good storage engineer who saw a Tivo for the first time and realized there was only a single spindle in side were "How does that work?", and not "I know how that works."
They killed the competitor that worked towards standards based implementations of the technology. OWA is a great example of my point. Look at the Microsoft IE version and the non IE version.
The whole point was that the browser was becoming a platform... You know, like the OS is a platform now. Microsoft sidetracked that by making their browser the most common, and "better" as a platform. All the downsides of the browser as a platform with none of the benefits.
Yeah, Microsoft invented the technology, then killed it so they could maintain the platform dependence.
You have a great point if you really limit the definition of 'like'. You have to consider intent. To me, one technology is not 'like' another if the point of one is to inprove interoperablity, and the point of the other is to create vendor lock-in. Sure, the technologies developed by Microsoft back in the late '90s have been used as the cornerstone for AJAX, but things have changed since then. Now, with AJAX, and unlike then, what we have instead of a proprietary scripting extension is a set of"well-documented features present in all major browsers on most existing platforms". It's that last part that Microsoft killed... At least, they beat it down for a while anyway. It's ironic that their own technology is now being used for exactly the opposite purpose it was introduced for, but then again, it's ironic that you're using it as the basis for your argument when it's also the basis for my argument. Finally, "embrace and extend" is being used against them.
I'm appologize for having answered the question you thought was rhetorical using your own referneces.
Microsoft was convicted of including a BROWSER in their operating system. Roll that around in your head for a second -- doesn't that seem utterly ridiculous from the vantage point of 2006? Can you imagine an operation system that doesn't include a browser as a fundamental tool?
You should read your own sentence and use it as a mental exercise in cause and effect.
Also: Think of what *isn't* in most operating systems by default that would have been if the IE bundling hadn't happened. Technologies like AJAX should have existed in the late '90s, but were killed so that microsoft could maintain the platform dependence they worked so hard for. Eight years from now, when you look back and say "Can you imagine an application you had to run some particular operating system for?" you should be thinking to yourself that it could have happened eight years sooner, were it not for Microsoft including a BROWSER in their operating system.
But writing and reading data at the same time from the same hard drive was neither new nor non-obvious, no?
That statement has a lot in common with others in this thread. When you generalize, you leave off details. The details are the important part. The patent isn't for "reading and writing data on a hard drive at the same time 'with video'" like most 'on the internet' patents. It was for a specific way of handling more data than would normally be possible to read and write at the same time. It describes a very particular pattern of caching and IO based on the drive's capabilities. It's almost irrelevant now, because hard drive performance has increased so much. You could likely implement DVR technology without violating the patent these days. This lawsuit wasn't about now, though, it was about then. Tivo isn't suing somebody who worked around the patent, they're suing a company that couldn't get their device to work until they blatently copied the technology in a Tivo box.
And as for whether it wasn't obvious that you'd want to do it - I don't believe that has anything to do with the patentability of an "invention"
More likely, they didn't even think of it, or didn't think it was possible until someone showed them a working version.
My point exactly. That is the very definition of novel and non-obvious.
But, it's just that, an idea, and ideas aren't supposed to be patentable.
Um, last I checked they had an idea and an implementation. That's *exactly* what's supposed to be patentable. We're not talking about a company that patented an idea and then tried to make a living as an IP warehouse. They built the device. It's no small feat for a startup company to bring a comsumer electronics product to market, and it wouldn't *ever* happen without the patent system.
There are *tons* of examples of junk patents, but this isn't one of them. They only possible argument against this patent would be if somebody else had done it first, but that would be an argument of who, and not what.
You actually didn't have to patent it... Just tell some people it existed. Then it would have been prior art. But then again, I don't know exactly what it is that the device you're talking about did, if it was really similar to the tivo patent or if it even really existed. Most companies that develop technology and employ more than a dozen people have an employee who's job it is to remind the engineers that things they think are trivial are actually patentable.
To those of us not addicted to television, yes, a TiVo is nothing more than a glorified VCR.
I think you have that backwards. To people who *are* addicted to television, Tivo is just a glorified VCR. To people who aren't addicted to television, Tivo makes the good bits watchable.
We don't care whether it copies every show by a certain director, with a certain actor, or every rerun of I Love Lucy.
Neither do I.
All of these minor features a TiVo has may be very important to you so you see a TiVo as much more than a VCR.
The feature that makes Tivo important is the feature that makes it so I can sit down and watch the one or two good bits of television whenever the hell I feel like without having to know anything at all about schedules, channel names, listings, actor/actress/writer names, or anything like that. Tivo makes it so you don't have to be a slave to the television in order to enjoy television in a way a VCR can't. I don't know why I'm arguing with you about it though, since it's clear from your repeated commentary that you really have no clue what interaction with a Tivo is like. You have a really backwards idea of what it is that a Tivo does for you.
I hope you're not suggesting that the idea of automating tasks is innovative
You should apply for a patent on trivializing innovations. You've got a real knack for boiling all the features of a complex device down into one blatently understated generalization and then writing it off. If you're so smart you should really put your time into inventing the next obvious invention and cashing out.
What about a crackpot capitalist country that refuses to sign treaties on anti-personnel mines, war crimes
What's crackpot about not being clinically stupid? We still use mines in the Korean DMZ, so how can we sign a treaty agreeing not to use them?
How can we sign warcrimes treaties that would either reclasify past actions as warcrimes retroactively, or allow for politically motivated, junk prosecutions? There was a time when European countries cared about their soverignty. I think you guys are due for another war as soon as you remember why that's important.
They exist for protecting new and nonobvious inventions.
Recording and playing back video at the same time from the same hard dirve was both new and non-obvious when they filed the patent. I don't know why it's so hard for you to see that. There were plenty of experts in the field... People who made non-linear digital editing stations, etc... None of those people thought of it. There are other people who were making DVRs at the time, Echostar for example, and they didn't think of it until they had a Tivo to play with (their DVR could only play back when it wasn't recording).
How does that not qualify as non-obvious? What does qualify as non obvious to you? Not only wasn't it obvious that it was possible, but it wasn't obvious that you'd want to do it, until somebody did.
Those millions of lines of code and R&D efforts were made by parties who aren't TiVo. Why should TiVo get a 20-year monopoly based on the fruits of other peoples' work?
The things that make it easy for you to do this on your linux box came *after* Tivo got their patent and made it work. They got their monopoly based on work they did, not work other people did.
Additionally, there's a good chance hard drive wouldn't have developed the way they did if it weren't for Tivo. Hard drive manufactures are very customer centric. If there wasn't a demand for drives that were good at multi-streaming, they wouldn't have developed those features, and would have worked on something else instead.
TiVo didn't do any of the work to make this possible.
Also, that's not true. They worked with hard drive manufacturers to make drives more suitable. They released code as open source that was re-incorporated in the Linux kernel. They did the integration work and proved the concept so that all those future people would even bother to try.
It sounds like you have a problem with the patent system, not with Tivo. Maybe you don't like that the first person to file gets a monopoly on the tech, but there's a damned good chance that there wouldn't be a slashdot for you to post to, or a computer on your desk for you to post it from if that patent system wasn't there.
This was a lawsuit about how Echostar used Tivo's methods to get this stuff to work on hardware that barely supports it, not about your MythTV box, or your shell script. They're not abusing their patent. You can't fault them for technology moving faster than the patent system.
So because the complexity was abstracted away for you by millions of lines of code and millions of dollars of hard drive R&D, the problem isn't complex?
Let me try my hand at one of these examples of yours:
Today on any Tivo I could:
Push "Live TV" Push Record (now use the pause button to pause and unpause video)
That wasn't hard at all. The problem isn't complex.
Nevermind the fact that linux is only capable of doing that today because many people (including Tivo) changed many things about how pipes, filesystems, VM, and disk scheduling work in the hundreds of thousands of lines of kernel code that make those commands possible... And forget completely that you have a complex hardware encoder that makes that first command you used possible...
When I first saw a TiVo years ago, the only thing that impressed me was that hard drive technology could handle the bandwidth of reading and writing two separate video streams since random seeks are required in between the two
Funny, that's what the patent is for.
Let me rephrase in everyday terminology: it records television programs.
Don't watch somebody use a Tivo. Actually use a Tivo. Yeah, it records television programs. The key is in how it decides what to record and how you tell it what to playback. It doesn't just record programs, it finds and prioritizes the programs, keeps track of what you've already seen, makes it easy for you to find new stuff, does a fairly good job of figuring out what you might like and recording that too, maintains a cache of what's live......and that's before you get into any of the network features.
What are you, retarded? It's a VCR with extra features made possible by its large capacity random access data storage medium and a network connection to a database of television shows.
Oh, a database you say? But I thought you said they just replaced a tape with a hard drive? Yeah, they did. And they replaced the electronics with a computer. And they replaced the buttons and switches and timers with some software that does a *lot* of stuff that a VCR can't do. At the same time, there's stuff a VCR can do that a Tivo can't do... Because they're not the same thing at all.
A Tivo changes the way you watch TV that you couldn't dream of doing with a whole array of hard-drive enabled VCRs.
The thing is, if you give any competent engineer, who has never seen a DVR, the task of building a box with all these features, he'd build something that would work.
Then why didn't Echostar make it work? Their box could only record or playback. It couldn't do both at once until they had a Tivo to play with and copy. Or would your argument be that those guys who made a whole digital sattelite system from the ground stations to the sattelites, to the set-top boxes were incompetent?
Of course, any competent engineer would build in easy and/or automatic commercial skipping.
And any competent business person and corporate lawyer wound't let the box out the door with that feature enabled.
There's more to a patent than obviosness. The idea has to be novel. Maybe it's obvios to you in hindsight, but if it was so obvios back then, why hadn't anybody (including the makers of high end digital video editing stations, who were the most skilled in the requisite arts at the time) thought of it yet?
This is like arguing that the first person to do multi-tasking on a PC deserves a patent for realizing that multi-tasking wasn't only something that supercomputers can do.
No it's not. Nobody was doing random simultanious recording and playback off the same physical media on *any* type of hardware. It's not like they took an old idea and made it work on cheap hardware. They actually did something new.
It's easy to say something is obvious with the benefit of hindsight.
Unfortuantly, it's more likely that a patent license will be in the works for DirecTV. DirecTV seems more interested in limiting functionality to it's users than Tivo. If I can't Tivo with DirecTV anymore, they'll lose a customer, because their new DVR is just a DVR, it doesn't do what you expect your Tivo to do.
Providing a service to schedule recording TV shows to a hard drive is mildly innovative but it is not a "eureka" moment, it's just bundling. You could record a show to magnetic tape at a certain time with a run-of-the-mill VCR.
It's clear from that comment that you have no idea what a TiVO does. Try one some time and then you can come back and tell us all how wrong you were.
Tivo doesn't record a show at a certain time. It manages and acquires content for you. It's nothing like a VCR in any way. Seriously, try it. If what you said is what you think a Tivo does, your mind will be blown by what a Tivo *actually* does.
That's what was novel about TiVO's device. They had the same hardware limitations as everybody else, but they figured out how to get the data on and off anyway. TiVO didn't make their device work because they put a faster drive in their box than Echostar. They made it work because they were smart about where to put the data. That's not trivial.
Could you record to and playback from random locations on that video tape at the same time? No? Well then they did way more than replace a tape with a drive, didn't they?
You try taking a hard drive from 1997 and recording and playing back MPEG2 data in real time simutaniously on it. You already know they figured it out, and it would still be a challenge even if you were an expert (which it seems fairly clear you aren't since you con't grasp the complexity of the problem).
At the time TiVO came out, doing what they did with the hardware available was hardly a small feat. Sure, now it seems easy, because we have much faster hard drives and computers. Back then it was amazing, and decidedly non-obvious that you could get commodity hardware to do that (playback and record at full speed at the same time, that is).
The first two times I tried wearing contacts instead of glasses, my eyes got dry and I didn't last more than a week before putting the glasses back on (or squinting a lot, which was just bad news).
A few years ago, I got a new set (They were Focus, but I wear Accuview Advanced Torric now because they don't rotate as much) and decided to stick with them for a month, because my doctor told me it would take that long for my eyes to get used to producing extra moisture. I'm glad I stuck with it, because I can't live without my contacts now. They're so much less life-invasive than glasses. They don't get in the way, I have good peripheral vision, and way better depth perception...
Anyway, try and wear them *every day* for a month to give your eyes a chance to adapt.
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Apparently by requiring that U.S. citizens e above the law.
I'm not kidding here, this is precisely what the U.S. position was: War crime tribunal? Ok, if we're immune.
Read what I said again. Read what you said again... Notice how they're pretty much the same?
That's not because of "politically motivated blahblablah", that's a clear "we intend to commit warcrimes, but we don't mind if no one else is allowed to".
Wrong. That's a "We've done this stuff already, and we're not putting those guys in jail". Regardless, they're not warcrimes until the treaty goes into effect. We're allowed to have a different idea as to what constitutes a war crime right up to the point where a coalition of foreign militaries rolls their tanks into Washington DC to arrest our elected leaders.
As far as I'm concerned, however, sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to have a double standard.
256MB of RAM is a *HUGE* amount of RAM. The original Tivos ha 16MB.
And then rember back when TIVO came out (1999) 256MB of ram was not uncommon.
256MB was really high end in 1999. It was absolutely unheard of in an embedded device.
By the way have you ever used MythTV to be such a critic?
Whoever said I disliked MythTV? I think it's great.
I think it's less obvious than you think, because it's a harder problem than you seem to understand. All the examples you gave were linear. Random makes the problem much more difficult, and the performance of the device much, much lower. Let's put it this way: It seems it's not obvious to you how non-trivial of a problem it is. You, however, picked exactly the wrong person to accuse of not being an expert in the field, since I make my living as a low-level storage driver and performance engineer.
I've done crazy stuff with hard drives. I've written journaling code that precicely times the rotation of the disk so you can optimize your scheduling to write to the sector that is on it's way by the head and avoid the rotational latency. (The hard part there is figuring out exactly how fast your disk is spinning with enough accuracy... 15,000 RPM plus or minus 2% makes it tricky). If you're doing something like a tape delay, or playback during recording, you can do many thousands of IOPS on even the crappyiest of low end drives if you're clever. Want random access? You're down in the very low hundreds or double digits unless you pull some fancy, decidedly non-obvious tricks.
People who think what a Tivo did with what was available at the time really don't have an appreciation for how non-trivial it is to squeeze performance out of a rotational disk, and how much work went into your OS of choice to make the performance only kinda suck. It's not beyond the realm of comprehension for an expert, but that's a far cry from obvious. Hell, the only reason it works with things like MythTV without jumping through hoops is because computers have so much memory for cache in them these days.
I guarantee you that the first words out of every good storage engineer who saw a Tivo for the first time and realized there was only a single spindle in side were "How does that work?", and not "I know how that works."
They killed the competitor that worked towards standards based implementations of the technology. OWA is a great example of my point. Look at the Microsoft IE version and the non IE version.
The whole point was that the browser was becoming a platform... You know, like the OS is a platform now. Microsoft sidetracked that by making their browser the most common, and "better" as a platform. All the downsides of the browser as a platform with none of the benefits.
Yeah, Microsoft invented the technology, then killed it so they could maintain the platform dependence.
You have a great point if you really limit the definition of 'like'. You have to consider intent. To me, one technology is not 'like' another if the point of one is to inprove interoperablity, and the point of the other is to create vendor lock-in. Sure, the technologies developed by Microsoft back in the late '90s have been used as the cornerstone for AJAX, but things have changed since then. Now, with AJAX, and unlike then, what we have instead of a proprietary scripting extension is a set of"well-documented features present in all major browsers on most existing platforms". It's that last part that Microsoft killed... At least, they beat it down for a while anyway. It's ironic that their own technology is now being used for exactly the opposite purpose it was introduced for, but then again, it's ironic that you're using it as the basis for your argument when it's also the basis for my argument. Finally, "embrace and extend" is being used against them.
I'm appologize for having answered the question you thought was rhetorical using your own referneces.
Check your history again.
Inventing some base technologies isn't the same as inventing the whole.
Microsoft was convicted of including a BROWSER in their operating system. Roll that around in your head for a second -- doesn't that seem utterly ridiculous from the vantage point of 2006? Can you imagine an operation system that doesn't include a browser as a fundamental tool?
You should read your own sentence and use it as a mental exercise in cause and effect.
Also: Think of what *isn't* in most operating systems by default that would have been if the IE bundling hadn't happened. Technologies like AJAX should have existed in the late '90s, but were killed so that microsoft could maintain the platform dependence they worked so hard for. Eight years from now, when you look back and say "Can you imagine an application you had to run some particular operating system for?" you should be thinking to yourself that it could have happened eight years sooner, were it not for Microsoft including a BROWSER in their operating system.
But writing and reading data at the same time from the same hard drive was neither new nor non-obvious, no?
That statement has a lot in common with others in this thread. When you generalize, you leave off details. The details are the important part. The patent isn't for "reading and writing data on a hard drive at the same time 'with video'" like most 'on the internet' patents. It was for a specific way of handling more data than would normally be possible to read and write at the same time. It describes a very particular pattern of caching and IO based on the drive's capabilities. It's almost irrelevant now, because hard drive performance has increased so much. You could likely implement DVR technology without violating the patent these days. This lawsuit wasn't about now, though, it was about then. Tivo isn't suing somebody who worked around the patent, they're suing a company that couldn't get their device to work until they blatently copied the technology in a Tivo box.
And as for whether it wasn't obvious that you'd want to do it - I don't believe that has anything to do with the patentability of an "invention"
That's the part that makes it novel.
More likely, they didn't even think of it, or didn't think it was possible until someone showed them a working version.
My point exactly. That is the very definition of novel and non-obvious.
But, it's just that, an idea, and ideas aren't supposed to be patentable.
Um, last I checked they had an idea and an implementation. That's *exactly* what's supposed to be patentable. We're not talking about a company that patented an idea and then tried to make a living as an IP warehouse. They built the device. It's no small feat for a startup company to bring a comsumer electronics product to market, and it wouldn't *ever* happen without the patent system.
There are *tons* of examples of junk patents, but this isn't one of them. They only possible argument against this patent would be if somebody else had done it first, but that would be an argument of who, and not what.
You actually didn't have to patent it... Just tell some people it existed. Then it would have been prior art. But then again, I don't know exactly what it is that the device you're talking about did, if it was really similar to the tivo patent or if it even really existed. Most companies that develop technology and employ more than a dozen people have an employee who's job it is to remind the engineers that things they think are trivial are actually patentable.
Sounds like you dropped the ball.
To those of us not addicted to television, yes, a TiVo is nothing more than a glorified VCR.
I think you have that backwards. To people who *are* addicted to television, Tivo is just a glorified VCR. To people who aren't addicted to television, Tivo makes the good bits watchable.
We don't care whether it copies every show by a certain director, with a certain actor, or every rerun of I Love Lucy.
Neither do I.
All of these minor features a TiVo has may be very important to you so you see a TiVo as much more than a VCR.
The feature that makes Tivo important is the feature that makes it so I can sit down and watch the one or two good bits of television whenever the hell I feel like without having to know anything at all about schedules, channel names, listings, actor/actress/writer names, or anything like that. Tivo makes it so you don't have to be a slave to the television in order to enjoy television in a way a VCR can't. I don't know why I'm arguing with you about it though, since it's clear from your repeated commentary that you really have no clue what interaction with a Tivo is like. You have a really backwards idea of what it is that a Tivo does for you.
I hope you're not suggesting that the idea of automating tasks is innovative
You should apply for a patent on trivializing innovations. You've got a real knack for boiling all the features of a complex device down into one blatently understated generalization and then writing it off. If you're so smart you should really put your time into inventing the next obvious invention and cashing out.
What about a crackpot capitalist country that refuses to sign treaties on anti-personnel mines, war crimes
What's crackpot about not being clinically stupid? We still use mines in the Korean DMZ, so how can we sign a treaty agreeing not to use them?
How can we sign warcrimes treaties that would either reclasify past actions as warcrimes retroactively, or allow for politically motivated, junk prosecutions? There was a time when European countries cared about their soverignty. I think you guys are due for another war as soon as you remember why that's important.
Or maybe you should have patented it?
They exist for protecting new and nonobvious inventions.
Recording and playing back video at the same time from the same hard dirve was both new and non-obvious when they filed the patent. I don't know why it's so hard for you to see that. There were plenty of experts in the field... People who made non-linear digital editing stations, etc... None of those people thought of it. There are other people who were making DVRs at the time, Echostar for example, and they didn't think of it until they had a Tivo to play with (their DVR could only play back when it wasn't recording).
How does that not qualify as non-obvious? What does qualify as non obvious to you? Not only wasn't it obvious that it was possible, but it wasn't obvious that you'd want to do it, until somebody did.
Those millions of lines of code and R&D efforts were made by parties who aren't TiVo. Why should TiVo get a 20-year monopoly based on the fruits of other peoples' work?
The things that make it easy for you to do this on your linux box came *after* Tivo got their patent and made it work. They got their monopoly based on work they did, not work other people did.
Additionally, there's a good chance hard drive wouldn't have developed the way they did if it weren't for Tivo. Hard drive manufactures are very customer centric. If there wasn't a demand for drives that were good at multi-streaming, they wouldn't have developed those features, and would have worked on something else instead.
TiVo didn't do any of the work to make this possible.
Also, that's not true. They worked with hard drive manufacturers to make drives more suitable. They released code as open source that was re-incorporated in the Linux kernel. They did the integration work and proved the concept so that all those future people would even bother to try.
It sounds like you have a problem with the patent system, not with Tivo. Maybe you don't like that the first person to file gets a monopoly on the tech, but there's a damned good chance that there wouldn't be a slashdot for you to post to, or a computer on your desk for you to post it from if that patent system wasn't there.
This was a lawsuit about how Echostar used Tivo's methods to get this stuff to work on hardware that barely supports it, not about your MythTV box, or your shell script. They're not abusing their patent. You can't fault them for technology moving faster than the patent system.
So because the complexity was abstracted away for you by millions of lines of code and millions of dollars of hard drive R&D, the problem isn't complex?
Let me try my hand at one of these examples of yours:
Today on any Tivo I could:
Push "Live TV"
Push Record
(now use the pause button to pause and unpause video)
That wasn't hard at all. The problem isn't complex.
Nevermind the fact that linux is only capable of doing that today because many people (including Tivo) changed many things about how pipes, filesystems, VM, and disk scheduling work in the hundreds of thousands of lines of kernel code that make those commands possible... And forget completely that you have a complex hardware encoder that makes that first command you used possible...
When I first saw a TiVo years ago, the only thing that impressed me was that hard drive technology could handle the bandwidth of reading and writing two separate video streams since random seeks are required in between the two
...and that's before you get into any of the network features.
Funny, that's what the patent is for.
Let me rephrase in everyday terminology: it records television programs.
Don't watch somebody use a Tivo. Actually use a Tivo. Yeah, it records television programs. The key is in how it decides what to record and how you tell it what to playback. It doesn't just record programs, it finds and prioritizes the programs, keeps track of what you've already seen, makes it easy for you to find new stuff, does a fairly good job of figuring out what you might like and recording that too, maintains a cache of what's live...
What are you, retarded? It's a VCR with extra features made possible by its large capacity random access data storage medium and a network connection to a database of television shows.
Oh, a database you say? But I thought you said they just replaced a tape with a hard drive? Yeah, they did. And they replaced the electronics with a computer. And they replaced the buttons and switches and timers with some software that does a *lot* of stuff that a VCR can't do. At the same time, there's stuff a VCR can do that a Tivo can't do... Because they're not the same thing at all.
A Tivo changes the way you watch TV that you couldn't dream of doing with a whole array of hard-drive enabled VCRs.
The thing is, if you give any competent engineer, who has never seen a DVR, the task of building a box with all these features, he'd build something that would work.
Then why didn't Echostar make it work? Their box could only record or playback. It couldn't do both at once until they had a Tivo to play with and copy. Or would your argument be that those guys who made a whole digital sattelite system from the ground stations to the sattelites, to the set-top boxes were incompetent?
Of course, any competent engineer would build in easy and/or automatic commercial skipping.
And any competent business person and corporate lawyer wound't let the box out the door with that feature enabled.
There's more to a patent than obviosness. The idea has to be novel. Maybe it's obvios to you in hindsight, but if it was so obvios back then, why hadn't anybody (including the makers of high end digital video editing stations, who were the most skilled in the requisite arts at the time) thought of it yet?
This is like arguing that the first person to do multi-tasking on a PC deserves a patent for realizing that multi-tasking wasn't only something that supercomputers can do.
No it's not. Nobody was doing random simultanious recording and playback off the same physical media on *any* type of hardware. It's not like they took an old idea and made it work on cheap hardware. They actually did something new.
It's easy to say something is obvious with the benefit of hindsight.
Unfortuantly, it's more likely that a patent license will be in the works for DirecTV. DirecTV seems more interested in limiting functionality to it's users than Tivo. If I can't Tivo with DirecTV anymore, they'll lose a customer, because their new DVR is just a DVR, it doesn't do what you expect your Tivo to do.
Providing a service to schedule recording TV shows to a hard drive is mildly innovative but it is not a "eureka" moment, it's just bundling. You could record a show to magnetic tape at a certain time with a run-of-the-mill VCR.
It's clear from that comment that you have no idea what a TiVO does. Try one some time and then you can come back and tell us all how wrong you were.
Tivo doesn't record a show at a certain time. It manages and acquires content for you. It's nothing like a VCR in any way. Seriously, try it. If what you said is what you think a Tivo does, your mind will be blown by what a Tivo *actually* does.
That's what was novel about TiVO's device. They had the same hardware limitations as everybody else, but they figured out how to get the data on and off anyway. TiVO didn't make their device work because they put a faster drive in their box than Echostar. They made it work because they were smart about where to put the data. That's not trivial.
Could you record to and playback from random locations on that video tape at the same time? No? Well then they did way more than replace a tape with a drive, didn't they?
You try taking a hard drive from 1997 and recording and playing back MPEG2 data in real time simutaniously on it. You already know they figured it out, and it would still be a challenge even if you were an expert (which it seems fairly clear you aren't since you con't grasp the complexity of the problem).
At the time TiVO came out, doing what they did with the hardware available was hardly a small feat. Sure, now it seems easy, because we have much faster hard drives and computers. Back then it was amazing, and decidedly non-obvious that you could get commodity hardware to do that (playback and record at full speed at the same time, that is).
The first two times I tried wearing contacts instead of glasses, my eyes got dry and I didn't last more than a week before putting the glasses back on (or squinting a lot, which was just bad news).
A few years ago, I got a new set (They were Focus, but I wear Accuview Advanced Torric now because they don't rotate as much) and decided to stick with them for a month, because my doctor told me it would take that long for my eyes to get used to producing extra moisture. I'm glad I stuck with it, because I can't live without my contacts now. They're so much less life-invasive than glasses. They don't get in the way, I have good peripheral vision, and way better depth perception...
Anyway, try and wear them *every day* for a month to give your eyes a chance to adapt.