Microsoft Sues TiVo

doperative notes that "TiVo [is accused] of infringing four patents. Microsoft is asking that TiVo be barred from importing the digital-video recorders, which are primarily made in Mexico and sold in the U.S... The four patents in the ITC case relate to program schedules and selection, controlling the interface, and a way to restrict use of the DVR based on the program’s rating."

Funny...

[Daniel Phillips]

Funny how three of the patents were granted just at the time the Tivo must have been in final development.

Re:Usual bullshit...

[telemart73]

I respectfully disagree. Back in the day (2001?) I had a Microsoft UltimateTV for our satellite service. I felt the technology was considerably more sophisticated and easier to use than Tivo. IIRC, the user interface was much quicker and effective and it also had dual tuners. I believe MS stopped selling it less than a year after release for whatever reason. I kept using it as my preferred DVR until DirecTV released their HD DVR. Granted, these patents appear amazingly broad and I have personal issue with software patents like this, but saying MS cannot compete on merits is not true, at least in this case, IMHO.

Re:The Complaint and Patents

[AlwaysTheQuietOne]

I've looked at those patents. They're not "inventions", they're requirements documents. If that is the criteria, I should patent everything I ever developed requirements for and coded.

Time to End software Patents

[bobs666]

These are not valid patents. They are just products Microsoft hopes to sell one day. So Microsoft is just abusing patent law to build the monopoly.

When will this charade be put to an end. And since when did Microsoft own the rights to the function of the 'V' chip?

Oh ya, when the patent was granted. Go figure.

Re:Microsoft Owns the Law

[Grishnakh]

No, MS winning against Eolas wouldn't have helped anything or changed the situation. If someone has to be a patent troll, I'm happy to see them go after Microsoft and other big monopolists and take away some of their cash. I haven't seen Eolas suing anyone else, such as Opera or Mozilla, so I don't feel to badly about them.

What I would have liked to see in that situation was MS do something useful with their power, and pressure government to fix the patent laws so that they silliness with software patents is stopped. But they didn't do that; they'd rather pay $500M so they can keep using their software patents as offensive weapons against smaller competitors.

Re:The Complaint and Patents

[sortadan]

as a long time tivo customer, i feel comfortable saying go microsoft!

tivo cares nothing for it's users, and the sooner they go out of business the better.

once upon a time they had a great product, and they made it terrible by forcing annoying advertisements in all their menus, as soon as you pause anything, over live tv when a product is featured, and they don't provide digital over the air programming info for non-cable subscribers. 100% of customer contact goes through a call center which is powerless to perform all but the most basic tasks.

/rant