TiVo Relaunching As a Patent Troll? 335
An anonymous reader writes "TiVo's quarterly call was a bit more dramatic than usual. While they continue to lose customers and innovate 'at a very unhurried pace,' TiVo seeks a repeat DISH Network performance in going after AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) for infringement. Basically, TiVo's current business model appears to be ad sales and patent trolling."
Not a troll (Score:3, Informative)
It's a legitimate case for used technology.
A patent troll is just someone who patents lots of 'ideas' and then sue whoever happen to have something similar in the market.
Re:Not all that trollish! (Score:5, Informative)
Ridiculous or not, that the whole idea of patents, as a means of providing a reward for innovation and thereby encouraging innovation. To quote the provision of the US Constitution enabling patents and copyrights: "The Congress shall have the power [...] [t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Well, if Ford had invented the car, sure, it would be like only having Ford cars for a brief period after Ford invented them.
Re:TiVo was cool... (Score:3, Informative)
I have a Series 1 Tivo; bought it about 10 years ago with a lifetime subscription. I late 2004, the cableco offered an HD DVR with HDTV, etc, so I switched to that configuration and stuck the old Tivo on the shelf. In 2008 I subscribed to Netflix, and thought the cableco DVR really wasn't needed anymore since I rarely watch live sports at home, and everything else of interest in HD was available on HD DVD or upscaled DVD.
I looked at the Series 3 HD Tivo, and decided to get one because it was cheap enough to amortize the cost in a few years, could stream Netflix and had some other nice features.
My experience with it was bad, though. The thing had too many software bugs and there are far too many ads embedded in the menus. Tivo has unfortunately jumped the shark. I returned it, got a Roku box for Netflix, and reconnected my old Tivo (good thing I got the lifetime subscription), which makes sense now that the only timeshifting I need to do is for broadcast television, since everything else of interest to me can be streamed.
Sorry to say, but I think Tivo will not be a "going concern" for much longer, given, in my experience, that their product quality has plunged and the need for a DVR is diminishing as more content becomes available via streaming. It's interesting to me that streaming made the old Tivo relevant again.
Re:Not a good summary. (Score:2, Informative)
Further, the "unhurried pace" quote actually refers to dealing with an expired Java certificate in their desktop software (i.e. nobody's working on fixing it quickly.) "Innovating at an unhurried pace" is misleading and unsupported by the quote referenced.
Re:How is this a Patent Troll? (Score:3, Informative)
Digital video != DVR
Re:TiVo was cool... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How is this a Patent Troll? (Score:1, Informative)
Your DVR can't do a lot of things because the company that made it refused to get a license from Tivo.
Tivo innovated, a lot. Their main patent involves the use of a buffering mechanism to allow you to pause, rewind, and ff on Live TV. Simple enough, it's using a buffer on disc along with an encoder and decoder chip that are wired into DMA, so that you can bypass the bottleneck of the CPU and such.
It wasn't an obvious innovation, and nobody had done it before. It was, however, a necessary innovation, because without it, the hardware at the time (1998) wasn't up to the task. Nowadays, a modern PC is fast enough to pull it off without trickery like this, but guess what: Every modern consumer DVR device uses this technique. Why? Because it's cheap commodity hardware, they have to do this sort of thing.
Tivo's patent is valid and they deserve to win this suit. They were more than fair, approached every cable company, tried to license their software to them for cable box devices, etc, etc. They deserve to get paid.
Re:TiVo was cool... (Score:3, Informative)
BUT, other companies are still pedaling their hardware that infringes on Tivo's (still valid) hardware patents.
Is anyone else imagining Tivo as the Wicked Witch of the West, pedaling on a bicycle in a twister, cackling about patents?
Re:How is this a Patent Troll? (Score:1, Informative)
If it is such a minor feature, then you would think competitors could wait another ten years (when the patent appears set to expire) to incorporate the feature into their own products. Or, if there is the value of the feature is low, that any royalties that TiVo could extract from competitors would be low because of short demand for licenses.
Arguing that "everyone" has non-novel and "non-original" (do you mean obvious?) does not address whether this particular feature was novel and nonobvious. Look at the history of the application in PAIR [uspto.gov]. The application was rejected three times. Arguments and claim amendments were made. If you can find some better art than what the examiner found, then perhaps you could file for reexamination (or tell TiVo's competitors about the art so that they can do so). Saying an invention is not new does not prove that the invention is not new; showing evidence of what existed before the invention is key.
Perhaps (and its 20 years from the date of filing, ignoring term extensions that can occur under certain circumstances and assuming that the patent holder pays all maintenance fees). Although arguments that patents last too long (or in some industries, not long enough) really go more to tweaking the patent system, not abolishing it for any set of technologies.