TiVo vs Echostar, again // 2008-11-03

Just when you thought it was safe to use your Echostar DISH DVR, TiVo is reopening its long-running battle with Echostar.

Legal eagles will remember that TiVo in April won a very long-running lawsuit (the action started in 2004) with Echostar that saw the court award TiVo with $104m in damages and interest for patent violations by Echostar. The patent in question was for a “multimedia time warping system” that the US Patent and Trademark Office found to be valid and enforceable.

Echostar paid over the cash on October 8. But the legal battle between the pair is far from over, because the court also ruled that Echostar/Dish must disable all its DVRs.

Echostar insists it has “worked around” the patent-protected areas and is no longer using the TiVo intellectual property. Echostar/Dish says its customers can continue using their existing set-top boxes. Three weeks ago Dish said: “the Supreme Court’s decision does not impact our software design-around, which has been placed in Dish DVRs subject to the district court’s injunction, and our customers can continue using their Dish DVRs.”

Echostar/Dish could eliminate this problem instantly by paying a licence fee to TiVo, but most observers see any prospect of this happening as lower than zero. But there’s a larger question for the world, which concerns other non-TiVo DVR/PVR units, and the question of their basic internal functionality. TiVo’s “time warping” technology gives viewers the ability to pause, rewind and fast forward live television shows. Just like the NDS system, or technologies in widespread use by Korean and Chinese box-suppliers.

The ongoing US litigation might give everyone some eventual guidance, but the original litigation spent much of its time in studying in minute detail the specific patents, and delivered its verdict in favour of TiVo.

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