On Second Thought... Appeals Court Vacates TiVo's Big Patent Win Over Echostar
from the not-so-fast-there... dept
TiVo's lawsuit against EchoStar for patent infringement has been a mostly one-sided affair. TiVo appeared to win at every turn, to the point that there were stories suggesting EchoStar would have to start blocking the use of its own DVR. TiVo had celebrated these victories by suing others as well, and demanding ridiculous sums of money from EchoStar. Of course, it seemed odd to us that, while all of this was happening, the US Patent Office was admitting the patents might not be valid. Oops.Today, however, TiVo got some bad news. Despite initially siding with TiVo, the Federal Circuit has vacated the win, and agreed to rehear the case. Perhaps TiVo needs to buy some local livestock in DC, like it did in East Texas...
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Funny side story
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Software patents may make absolutely zero sense, but if they're going to exist sanctions for violating them should exist.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
That statement makes no sense.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
I guess TiVo would know better than to sue the gift-givers, but they have no problem suing direct competitors that likely use an idea within their product that TiVo had described overly broadly within their patent claims despite likely being a fairly natural path to take for numerous high-achieving engineers.
Really, this tells me that TiVo has no respect for the tremendous cumulative amount of hard work and creativity that has gone into the software they got for $0. Either that or they think they the open source developers are suckers. Or perhaps they feel entitled to many many billions of dollars off their $0 license fees.
When your brand takes a hit, prevent the competition from taking your customers by suing them for injunctive relief with anything at all no matter how unethical or disrespectful. [I'm not sure if this is the case here, but this came to mind since TiVo once backpeddled into using DRM to remove some nice features they had originally introduced when they were looking to make a name for themselves. In fact, TiVo's DRM was a major motivation for the Free Software Foundation to revamp their GPL license that had been unchanged and in widespread use for about a decade and a half.]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Uh . . . Charlie?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]