Bust out the forks, because it looks like the
long-running dispute between DISH and TiVo is coming to an end (
yes,
again). The Supreme Court denied DISH's appeal in the DVR "time-warp" patent infringement case and in the next few day DISH will release $104 million ($94 million plus interest) from an escrow account to TiVo to cover damages stretching back to September 8, 2006. The dust isn't all settled, though, as there's more litigation in the pipeline regarding DISH's supposed
workaround software currently deployed to its DVRs. Certainly, this is good news for TiVo's finances, but we'd really like to see some improvements with TiVo itself --
LiquidTV / TiVo PC is a small step in the right direction, but more advanced
concepts are what we're calling for, here.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jake @ Oct 7th 2008 2:52PM
Speaking of LiquidTV: when are we gonna get that reivew? I'm really curious to see how snappy the interface is on relatively fast PC hardware!
Mark Blafkin @ Oct 7th 2008 5:37PM
The patent system is in desperate need of reform, but the case of Tivo reminds us why we still need it so desperately. Without it, all true innovators might be resigned to the fate of MITS/Altair and Atari.
http://blog.actonline.org/2008/10/yeah-for-patent.html
squiggleslash @ Oct 8th 2008 7:40AM
I'm not sure TiVo is as special as people think it is. One of the patents at issue here is the concept of watching something that's started recording, which is blatantly obvious and certainly shouldn't deserve a patent.
As to the wider concept of DVRs, TiVo took an old concept at precisely the time it became commercially viable to make mass consumer versions (the release of the first TiVo came about shortly after 40Gb hard drives went sub-$200), and made a concerted effort to put a user friendly interface on it.
TiVo deserve credit for popularizing the DVR by packaging it as a consumer friendly box with tuners, but I'm not sure that means they deserve ownership of the DVR concept as many of their supporters believe. There is a place between "TiVo should own everything", which is the situation now, and "TiVo should be closed down" which many of TiVo's supporters think is the opposite. So far as I can tell, Dish's DVRs borrow heavily from the TiVo interface, but much of that interface is obvious, and the "Watch while recording" patent itself is obnoxious.