EchoStar ordered to pay TiVo (another) $200m Dish Network and its sister company EchoStar must cough up an extra $200 million to TiVo for continuing to offer DVR functionality in their set-top boxes after being slapped with a court injunction. The award comes after TiVo successfully argued to a Texas judge in June that EchoStar was in contempt of an order to disable its …
'Dish said while it would apparel the ruling...'
How is that going to work then??
Anyhoo, you would think with all that extra money, TiVo would look to expand its subbers.
How about launching an S3 into the UK? My S1 was bought on launch, (with the Lifetime Sub), and is now 8 years old. It still works champion but does lack modern PVR refinements.
A Series 3 TiVo launch in the UK, is long overdue!!
I also found this ad rather distasteful, just due to it's directly contradicting actual reviews -- it seems everyone who has used both prefers Tivo, and Tivo has several features Dish DVRs do not. I wouldn't say the Dish DVR is bad but I don't think anyone except Echostar would consider Echostar DVR to be better than Tivo.
Almost certainly. If it is http://www.google.com/patents?id=IeoIAAAAEBAJ&dq=6,233,389 then it probably applies to your old VCR. Any sane patent process would have ruled against it on the grounds of prior art AND obviousness.
Still, the good old USPTO re-examined it and found nothing wrong, and a court then ruled on that basis. I sympathise with a company that finds its whole line of business ruled out of existence by a cabal of morons, but the bottom line is that ignoring court injunctions is a daft idea even if you are right.
...and whilst I'm ranting, devices to separate, blend, time-warp and time-shift audio and video streams pretty much sums up the operation of a TV editing suite, so presumably TiVo reckon their owed royalties from all the broadcasters as well, back-dated to long before TiVo themselves (or their absurd patent) ever existed.
Recording one programme while watching another ought to be blindingly obvious -- you just need two receivers. Remembering where things are on a disk also ought to be blindingly obvious -- it's called a file system. There is nothing new in this "invention", and plenty of prior art.
EchoStar should carry on regardless. It is clear that the "patent" in question was falsely granted. TiVo are not only being vexatious litigants, but are also in contempt of court as they are using the court system to subvert the law by attempting to enforce a patent that they are fully aware should never have been granted in the first place, on grounds of obviety, prior art and excess of scope.
Grenade, because that's what the patent system needs.
If you go and READ the patent (Ken Hagan has provided a link above) then you'll realise that (in my opinion) Myth does not infringe the patent - and I suspect many others might not. The patent is NOT on DVR technology itself (which people have pointed out has prior art), but on a specific way of doing it which allows custom hardware to shepherd block of data around and avoid the need for a powerful CPU to make it all work. I strongly suspect that most commercial PVR boxes do use something similar enough to make an infringement claim stick.
A little understanding before spouting off works wonders - but isn't half as much fun :-)
The ability of peripheral devices to directly access memory is called "Direct Memory Access" and has been around for ever. The notion of a Central Processing Unit was something that appeared breifly in the 1960s, unfortunately it hung around just long enough to make it into textbooks. There is no such thing as a CPU; there are cooperating processing entities of which the DMA unit acts like a coprocessor running a trivial program.
(Skeptics who insist on trying to determine what's logic and what's a processor should check out the picoBlaze.)
I'm sick of ignorant people patenting old technology. They get away with it because the companies don't care -- they need the patent portfolio for commercial reasons -- and the USPTO thinks its somehow maintaining American dominance in this field (rather than making us the laughing stock of the world).
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