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...
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Funny side story
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Software patents may make absolutely zero sense, but if they're going to exist sanctions for violating them should exist.
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That statement makes no sense.
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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.]
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Uh . . . Charlie?
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