TiVo, which manufactures digital video recorders (DVRs), is involved in a patent dispute with EchoStar, the owner of Dish Network. TiVo alleges that the generic DVRs offered by Dish to its subscribers infringe upon various patents held by TiVo. A federal court yesterday ordered EchoStar to stop selling the allegedly infringing DVRs. The court also gave EchoStar 30 days to disable both the recording and playback capabilities of most of the Dish DVRs currently in subscribers' homes (about 3 million). The district court refused to stay its order, although the Federal Circuit today stepped in to stay the injunction, at least for the time being.
Details are at News.com and Zatz Not Funny; Patently-O
has copies of the district court's order and opinion.
Ordering EchoStar to stop offering DVRs (and worse, to break the ones already in use) is simply going to remove Dish as a viable competitor to DirecTV, Comcast, etc., and drive up programming costs for all consumers. We need more competition in this market, not less, and reducing competition in the programming market is ultimately going to hurt TiVo as well. Instead, why not simply require EchoStar to pass along to TiVo the monthly DVR fees that it collects?
2 comments:
That's all TiVo really wants, to be paid a reasonable licensing fee for their patents. DirecTV and Comcast are the best known licensees, since they're using the TiVo software itself. But there are others - Sony, which used to make TiVo-based boxes, no longer does. However, they still license the patents to use in their own DVRs. As do others.
TiVo tried for literally years to get Echostar to license the patents from them. Echostar refused, so TiVo eventually decided the only option left was the lawsuit. After winning the suit TiVo again tried to settle a license with Echostar. Again, Echostar refused. Then TiVo sought the injunction.
The injunction is really just a lever to move Echostar to license the patents. But if they refuse, then they should not be allowed to benefit from their intellectual property theft by continuing to offer the unlicensed service. And if they were slapped with an injunction, I doubt any DVRs will be turned off - they'd give in and license the patents before allowing that to happen.
Did you read the patent? Sounds like a VCR. The only real difference is the storing of the files as MPEG and the storing of the channel info. So, store the files as AVI then? I don't know how you get around the channel info, though I'd argue that TV Guide is prior art ;)
Tivo is just bitter that they had a huge jump on the industry and are still losing money. *pats his MythTV box....
MJ
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