TiVo future turns on patents (fast forward, rewind, time warp dvr technology owned by Tivo?)

TiVo future turns on patents

NEW YORK, Aug. 31 (UPI) -- Patent infringement lawsuits filed by digital video recording developer TiVo have the potential to shift the industry dramatically, a market analyst said.

If TiVo wins court victories against Dish Network, Verizon and AT&T, "there's a high probability that (DVR producers and television carriers) will have to pay TiVo licensing fees," said Barton Crockett at Lazard Capital Markets.

TiVo claims it owns the patent to "time warp" technology that enables the viewer to watch the beginning of a show while the machine is recording the ending. The technology also controls basic functions, such as fast-forward and rewind, USA Today reported Monday.

To date, court skirmishes have gone both ways.

A Texas court ordered Dish Network to pay TiVo $105 million and cancel 4 million of its subscriptions.

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2009/08/31/TiVo-future-turns-on-patents/UPI-85881251727786/

Prior to Tivo DVRs worked like VCR. You manually set the channel, time, and it "turned on" and recorded the show.

Tivo created technology like "season pass", "tivo favorites", show ranking, conflict resolution, pause live tv (watch and record at the same time), etc.

So the "intelligent DVR" as opposed to a manual DVR they likely have a decent case.

Now Dish is just blatantly dishonest. Tivo supplied the source code and hardware to make a Dish licensed "Dish Tivo". Dish said we are going in another direction and then copied the code line for line. In court (original lawsuit) they opened up a Dish DVR and everything was indentical. It was TIVO hardware down to the powersupply. Dish loses is ordered to pay $100 million. Dish changes hardware and keep stealing the software. Tivo sues against the judge bumps the award to $800 million and unlike before requires Dish turn off 4 million existing boxes.

Dish simply stole the technology bit for bit no different then a robber stealing from a bank.

AT&T & Verizon aren't in the same boat but the could be found to be infringing. TIVO wrote a lot of very specific patents on the technology. They cross licensed a lot of stuff w/ ReplayTV (who is now defunct in the hardware DVR business).

I don't have all of the facts so there may be more to this than meets the eye, but it seems to me that this so-called "time warp" technology is simply a natural consequence of storing the audio-video stream as digital data on a random access hard drive (as opposed to analog on videotape). There doesn't seem to be any new technology here, just novel applications of existing technology. Does that qualify as patentable?

DVR existed prior to Tivo. Tivo claim is that those previous DVR did not allow recording & viewing of the same content.
Now maybe the "could" but they didn't. TIVO wrote the code to enable it and patented it first. Tivo patent isn't for random access of all data but rather the software layer that enables it to be seamless for the user in the DVR application.

Randomly accessing data on a randomly accessible digital medium (a hard drive) isn't something new. The only difference here is that the data is being displayed on a TV screen rather than a computer monitor. Is that really all that novel?

As a software developer I've always been quite dubious of software patents. The problem with such patents is that millions of lines of code are being written every day. Do I really need to do a patent search on every line of code I write? (Copyrights are of course, a different issue and need to be enforced.)

Another issue here is that, as I understand it, part of a Tivo's abilities come from modifications to the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is released under the GNU General Public License and any changes to it must be released under the same license and therefore the new code is publicly available to whoever wants to use it. We're talking about a change that allows reading a file while it's still being written. That ability seems like something that would most likely arise from a change to the kernel, but I could be mistaken about that. If the change is to the kernel than it shouldn't be patentable.

If GPL code led to this patent then the patent is invalid and that is a defense for AT&T, Verizon & Dish however if that was the case I would assume Dish would have brought that up before during or after they lost a $100 million and then $800 million lawsuit.

However they aren't patenting random access they are patenting USING random access to facilitate reading and writing a data stream in such a manner than to the user they are being done at the same time.