 KrKHeavy Artillery For The Little GuyPremium
join:2000-01-17
Tulsa, OK
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Re: TiVo gains second judgment against Echostar said by Bit:The patent office granted TiVo patents on what is obvious to everyone else to be prior art. This is where Echostar screwed up. They assumed this was apparent, this technology was under development all over the place, including theirs in-house. With prior-art and obviousness, I'm sure patent issues seemed minor and solve-able. With theirs and other DVR's under development, they'd not expect problems in perfecting their own. Which they did... and then had the boom lowered on them several years later after they had them out in circulation and lots of customers used to them and loving them. (Hello Rambus). Then in court Echostar still thought they'd win because they felt the Tivo patents would be voided. So they were wrong again. No wonder they fought it all the way and I don't blame them one bit. Even though a lot of people appear to dislike Ergen, very few people can say the man is stupid. If Echostar believed that they were wrong and had no case they'd of settled and licensed years ago. They fought because it the the right thing to do. Too bad they still lost. I admire them for standing on principle rather then just taking the bean-counter way and settling.... in this case the gamble didn't pay off.
It's not over for the 2nd round of extortion payments. but at his point Dish has little to lose, because they aren't going to turn off millions of DVR's. Tivo knows this and is looking to not only win big legally, they want to force Echostar into a really big licensing agreement that will cost subscribers milllions. SO no wonder they will fight on, and hope for the patents to be voided in the future.
It is laughable that the only quarter the "inventors of the DVR" turn a decent profit is when they extort money through their patent trolling schemes. But no matter, with ever declining revenues, their source of patent trolling revenues drying up and cable operators moving toward centralized storage, TiVo will be bankrupt soon enough and the TiVo thieves unemployed. THEN justice will be served. I worry they'll move on to Media PC type systems/Slingboxes etc next as their next target.
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"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
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