TiVo Wins Appeal On Patents For Pause, Ffwd, Rwd 215
Lorien_the_first_one writes "After years of wrangling, TiVo has won its day in court against Dish Network, formerly known as the EchoStar, when the Supreme Court declined to take up Dish Network's appeal, forcing the satellite television company to pay $104 million in damages. According to the article, 'TiVo originally won a patent infringement case in 2004 against Dish, which was then named EchoStar Communications. It charged that Dish illegally copied its technology, which allows people to pause, rewind, and record live television on digital video recorders.' Despite an injunction, Dish continued distributing its set-top boxes in the belief that the work-around they had implemented avoided infringing TiVo's patents. Now the case goes back to the lower court for review to determine if they did indeed steer clear of those patents."
Tomek Z. (Score:3, Funny)
It's great nobody patented car turning right yet. Imagine all those left-turn only cars...
Re:Fucking patent trolls (Score:3, Funny)
But TiVo runs (and contributes to) Linux. And these were defensive patents. That makes them okay, right?
Re:Tomek Z. (Score:4, Funny)
They call that NASCAR.
Re:Go TiVo (Score:5, Funny)
like if you are running FFWD and hit play it will rewind just a bit to take care of overshoot. Not an obvious feature but a VERY nice one and I'm pretty sure patented.
Actually it has been obvious for a few decades now:
$man rewind
int fseek(FILE *stream, long offset, int whence);
long ftell(FILE *stream);
void rewind(FILE *stream);
int fgetpos(FILE *stream, fpos_t *pos);
int fsetpos(FILE *stream, fpos_t *pos);
Re:Fast forward? (Score:2, Funny)
As everyone has already said, this is a hardware patent.
TiVo found a way to fit a flux capacitor inside their boxes.