Rovi Sues Amazon For Not Licensing Its Electronic TV Guide Patent

from the maybe-they-can-trade-one-click dept

Rovi, the DRM company which recently changed its name from Macrovision, surprised some folks three years ago, when it bought Gemstar/TV Guide. However, in that deal, Rovi got a bunch of patents, and now it's suing Amazon over its IMDB site, claiming the company is violating five different patents concerning electronic programming guides (i.e., tv listings). If this sounds ridiculous to you, welcome to today's patent system. The specific patents are listed here:

• 7,603,690: Interactive television program guide system with pay program package promotion
• 7,493,643: Program guide system with video-on-demand browsing
• 6,769,128: Electronic television program guide schedule system and method with data feed access
• 6,275,268: Electronic television program guide with remote product ordering
• 5,988,078: Method and apparatus for receiving customized television programming information by transmitting geographic location to a service provider through a wide-area network

The thing is, most of these seem pretty questionable. You could put any halfway decent programmer in front of a computer and say "I want to create a programs guide, just online" and they'd come up with much of this stuff. And now Amazon gets in trouble because IMDB includes an obvious service that fits with what IMDB does?

Filed Under: patents, programming guides, tv
Companies: amazon, rovi