Hulu Sued For Violating 'TV Guide' Patent

from the because-without-that,-no-one-would-have-thought-of-it dept

Earlier this year, we noted that Rovi (the hip new name for DRM company Macrovision) had taken a bunch of the patents it got when it bought Gemstar/TV Guide a few years back, and sued Amazon for daring to offer a TV listing on IMDB. Apparently Rovi is having so much fun suing people for doing totally obvious things that it's expanded the effort and is now suing Hulu as well. It's interesting to see that it's actually using different patents in this case, compared to in the Amazon case, but that doesn't make them any less questionable:

• 6,396,546: "Electronic television program guide schedule system and method"
• 7,103,906: "User controlled multi-device media-on-demand system"
• 7,769,775: "Search engine for video and graphics with access authorization"

Yet another case where actually doing the obvious thing to provide the obvious service you want to offer... gets you sued. America's innovation system at work.

Filed Under: patents, tv guide
Companies: gemstar, hulu, macrovision, rovi

Why Would A DRM Company Buy TV Guide?

from the because-it's-thinking-in-the-wrong-direction dept

Macrovision, a company that's well known for its DRM products, made quite a splash today with its announced plans to buy Gemstar-TV Guide for $2.8 billion. The rationale for the deal seems to be that the folks at Macrovision may actually believe the commonly stated myth that DRM "opens new business models." Macrovision talks about how combining its DRM with Gemstar listings and content could enable a bunch of new offerings -- but it's difficult to believe those new offerings will be particularly compelling. DRM has never been about enabling new business models, but about making any content less valuable by limiting its usefulness in the hopes of being able to charge separately for each use. Perhaps that's what they mean by "new business models" but it's hardly a business model if it's simply pissing off consumers. As Saul Hansell at the NY Times notes, the direction Macrovision seems to be moving in is (along with the recent story of hard drives that block MP3 sharing) one where technology companies feel that they need to be policing how people use content. That's a very anti-consumer position to be in -- and it's generally not a good business proposition to be focused on limiting consumers. Apparently, investors agree -- as they've sent the stock price of both companies way down in reaction to the deal.

Filed Under: content, drm, tv guide
Companies: gemstar, macrovision, tv guide