Judge Stops Countersuit against TiVo

Stargazer said:
If Dish would even try to buy Tivo and if Tivo would even sell out, Directv might try to outbid Dish for Tivo. Looks like Tivo is trying to set an example with Dish since they have sold more DVR's than anybody, why not start with them?

If Dish settles with Tivo and pays them royalties will this lead to DVR price increases? If they raise it on up to $7-8 maybe $10 even then that would be higher than what Directv charges. If it goes up that much then it better be per account and not per DVR. What about those DVR's that were promised to never be charged the DVR fee? That's another issue in itself. Even if they keep it the same they are still more expensive seeing that they charge the per DVR fee while Directv charges one DVR fee per account. That means an increase in the DVR fee would be a double whammy.


Smart money would be on "Yes" to all your questions.
 
Friend said:
Do you think 1$ is cheap, count it by number of subs. It will be almost 2 million per month (If dish has 2 million customers with DVR)

As a whole thats a lot of money but what I meant was that it can be very affordable to do without Dish losing most of their monthly DVR fee. In other words Dish stands to lose much more than what they would have to pay Tivo if it was only a $1 a month.
 
So, would now be a good time to twists Dish's arm into getting a cheap HD-DVR?

I currently don't have any DVR at all, and would love a HD-DVR. I have heard of people getting the Vip622 for $200, but then receiving a $20 credit on their bill for 10 months.

Do you think that if I call and express a desire to get and HD-DVR, but a concern about the lawsuit, I would be able to get that deal?

EDIT: I see on dish's site that they are offering $20 off for 10 months for everyone....or is that just new customers?
 
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MikeD-C05 said:
But Dish already is getting 5.00 per dvr on customers now , so what is the big deal with paying Tivo a 1.00 per sub? 2 million per month out of 5 million that they already are making still leaves 3 million a month for a dvr fee that they can charge just because they want to. If Charlie had been smart he would have been putting all those dvr fees over the years into an account that he would have made interest off of and he would have the money for the settlement with Tivo now.

how do we know he hasent been doing that, and thus the slow path to upgrading its satellite fleet becuse he saw this comming some day. wait, thats makes too much sence so i retract my last statement looking back and rember he dosent have commond sence.
 
I doubt Dish would give anybody a better deal after these announcements. I would think that they would pay Tivo before allowing the DVR's to get shutoff and Tivo knows this.
 
Has anyone ever addressed the issue of just how legal is it for any company to "disable" a product they have already sold to someone?

Everyone keeps talking about the possibility of Dish sending down a destructive beam that will stop our dvrs from working. I'm not sure that's legal either.

Besides, there is certainly other hardware out there that will do a lot of what Dish's dvrs do, such as playback from a HDD while recording to a HDD.

My Panasonic E-85 dvd recorder will allow delayed playback, pause, ff & rw of the same program that's being recorded. In fact, this unit even has a 30 second skip forward button. I know Panasonic isn't (can't) going to disable this unit either.

Personally I don't see how a court can get away with forcing a company to destroy a million products they no longer even own. That would be like Ford coming out and wrecking the CD player in my F-150 because it utilized a function that was a copywrite infringement.
 
waltinvt said:
Has anyone ever addressed the issue of just how legal is it for any company to "disable" a product they have already sold to someone?
Can a former Voom Motorola set top box OWNER, please respond to Walt.

I owned my Voom box and kept it live to the very end. Didn't they send down a signal to disable part of it on the last day ?

I remember some post on Voom SatGuys telling us to disconnect before Day Zero to avoid that last download, but I don't remember why.

TIA
 
Wasn't there a successful class action suit against the 7100 / 7200 Dishplayer? When I say successful, I mean Dish got hurt, lawyers got rich and subs got free PPVs:D .

Anyway, I don't know how the suit read but I do know that the units were severely disabled by software downloads and there were many unhappy customers.

Regardless of who's right or wrong here, how can a court force Dish to essentially "go" into the homes of customers that bought and paid for a product and proceed to damage / disable the functions of said product?

I can understand a court fining Dish and prohibiting them from selling anymore of the infringing receivers but to suggest that they can (and must) damage existing units that are no longer in their possession just seems ludicrous to me.
 
waltinvt said:
Supporting Founder - Wasn't there a successful class action suit against the 7100 / 7200 Dishplayer? When I say successful, I mean Dish got hurt, lawyers got rich and subs got free PPVs:D .

Isn't it amazing and ironic how many are quick to criticize and complain about TiVo's legitimate lawsuit against E*, and then discuss suing E* for breaking what they percieve is a contract with them. Some weird irony in that when it comes to loyalty. Like I have said before, if Dish is forced to disable their DVRs (which is a real possibility) then the future looks bleak financially and customer wise.:rolleyes:
 
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waltinvt said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doa
This is starting to get redicolous. I've always remeber echostar having there 7100 + 7200 models before tivo even was around, far as if dish had the patent on "dvr" probably not, but far as I remeber dish use to call it a "pvr".

Are you sure? I thought TiVo and Replay TV were both out before Dish had any pvr capability.

Tivo, Microsoft, and Replay all showed units at CES in January 1999. Tivo first shipped in March of '99. The Dishplayer shipped in June of 1999, but only had time shifting at that time - the full PVR capability came later (end of the year?). The PVR capability was there by the time I got mine in early 2000. I'm not sure when ReplayTV shipped to customers.

The Dish PVRs came a couple years later.
 
bytre said:
Tivo, Microsoft, and Replay all showed units at CES in January 1999. Tivo first shipped in March of '99. The Dishplayer shipped in June of 1999, but only had time shifting at that time - the full PVR capability came later (end of the year?). The PVR capability was there by the time I got mine in early 2000. I'm not sure when ReplayTV shipped to customers.

The Dish PVRs came a couple years later.
The dates of when the products hit the market are meaningless. Tivo Inc. was around a while before they went to market. It's not as if somebody opened a factory and started spitting out Tivos the next day. The issues revolve around key programmers who took the intellectual property of Tivo (already patented) and applied it to E*s second Gen DVR/PVR boxes (after M* bailed out).
 
Mtnmike said:
Isn't it amazing and ironic how many are quick to criticize and complain about TiVo's legitimate lawsuit against E*, and then discuss suing E* for breaking what they percieve is a contract with them. Some weird irony in that when it comes to loyalty. Like I have said before, if Dish is forced to disable their DVRs (which is a real possibility) then the future looks bleak financially and customer wise.:rolleyes:

Not sure what "mountain" you live on sonny but maybe the altitude is affecting your eyesight. :rolleyes:I didn't criticize TiVo nor say the suit wasn't legitimate. In fact in the post you replied to, I said "regardless of who's right or wrong". Furthermore, if you've spent much time reading my posts, you'd know I'm certainly not a Dish apologist.

I was just commenting on the legality of any company being allowed to damage a product they've already sold to someone.
 
JH1949 said:
Can a former Voom Motorola set top box OWNER, please respond to Walt.

I owned my Voom box and kept it live to the very end. Didn't they send down a signal to disable part of it on the last day ?

I remember some post on Voom SatGuys telling us to disconnect before Day Zero to avoid that last download, but I don't remember why.

TIA
There was a fear that a 'kill' signal would come down rendering the boxes useless for even OTA.

Of course those that did stay connected and watched the service go dark got no-such kill signal and a few months later we got our final bills and a letter telling us to enjoy our boxes or dispose of them properly.

Those of us who were leasing got free OTA tuners.

Those that 'bought' got money back for the boxes, and got to keep the box.

I don't think that was a bad deal all around.

More on topic, as a multiple Tivo owner I hope that this just gets settled and everyone moves on.
 
I think ultimately the courts will have to tackle the issue of customer owned hardware being able to be manipulated by someone that doesn't have the owners permission.

"Beaming" something that only affects the programming is one thing. For instance if a customer refuses to pay for their monthly programming package, the company supplying that programming should arguably have the right to prevent the receiver from receiving that programming.

However the functions of the receiver itself, such as the ability to record, pause rewind, store, or whatever that are an inherent part of the design of the receiver now belong to the owner of that receiver.

I would think that if any of those functions infringe on a protected patent and the owner of the patent wishes to stop the use of those functions, then it would be the responsibility of the patent owner (TiVo) to seek recourse & relief from each individual that owns such a receiver.

In other words, they may seek damages from Dish for producing the receivers and injunction of any further sale of the receiver but wouldn't injunction of further use of receivers already sold have to be directed at whomever owns the product?
 
You own the box (hardware) but Dish owns the software(I think I remember this being true) and probably has the right to modify the software any way they wish.

Your hardware will still perform those functions you stated(with the right sw), so dish didn't destroy the item you own(hardware)... the hardware just won't perform the functions without their software which they have the right to destroy.
 

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