Cisco vs TiVo DVR smackdown: Whose patent is it anyway?

It‘s hard to read a "TiVo is sued by someone" headline these days and get excited about it. Multiple courts, going up to the highest in the US, have backed TiVo‘s claims to its Time Warp and other patents, dating back to 2001, so how can it get its patents re-examined once again? But the US press got all excited this week …

[Ben 47]

The really odd thing is that in the UK, Cisco makes the hardware for the Virgin Media:TiVo boxes (although Samsung have recently been brought in as another supplier).

You would have thought if Cisco had that much of an issue with TiVo, they wouldn't haven't done so.

[Captain Save-a-ho]

Or more likely

Cisco is clearly big enough that the left hand simply doesn't know what the right hand is doing. There's plenty of instances where HP and Cisco still partner on deals, though almost all occur outside the US and Europe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm.....

I would also imagine that Scientific Atlanta had a whole load of patents pertaining to DV and it's recording/transmission from their acquisition of the a division of Barco. These would certainly have been previous to TiVo, but may not be in the specific area as TiVo is consumer and the Barco stuff certainly wasn't.

[Mage]

It's Wrong

No matter how many Judgements Tivo has, their patent should never have been allowed. Nor the the other patent that Cisco/Scientific Atlanta has.

I believe in patents, but these kind of patents shouldn't be allowed. All the DV concepts were just waiting for a affordable HW to implement.

[Morac]

Re: It's Wrong

TiVo's algorithms (which they patented) were specifically for doing DV on low cost hardware. That's how TiVo was able to produce a commercially available consumer DVR with only a 54 MHz CPU and 16 MB of RAM.