I agree! I have come to love how the Dish DVR's work, and like them much better then the TiVo DVR's that I have tried.BrianMis said:
TiVo seeks halt to EchoStar’s digital video-recording business
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Its all a bit ridiculous. But once they upheld the last Tivo dispute, this was inevitable. Now we know why D* hasnt released its mpeg4 non tivo DVR. Its not just incompetence.
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Dish DVRS are not like Tivos!
I have used Tivo before and now am using a Dish 625 I dont think Dish DVR is like Tivos at all!Tivo is just upset they can't sell their product.Its like saying all vcrs belong to one company its pure bull.
I have used Tivo before and now am using a Dish 625 I dont think Dish DVR is like Tivos at all!Tivo is just upset they can't sell their product.Its like saying all vcrs belong to one company its pure bull.
ralfyguy said:
No, everybody else who wanted to make a VHS recorder paid JVC a ROYALTY for its patented technology. Same way that everyone who makes a DVD player pays Phillips for its patent on optical recording, even though laserdisk players are dead.
This is getting tiring, folks. The world is not they way you wish it to be, it is the way it is. The fact is, right or wrong, TIVO has essential patents that the court has ruled are being violated by E*
How would you all feel if you managed to patent your really cool fish wiggler and then someone with more money went out and started building a slightly different fish wiggler, but they had more money from their fishing reel business and could market at a higher level? Would you try to do something to protect the market you had created? Would you try to stop the other guy from driving you into bankruptcy? Of course you would.
When DISH got into this, they had several choices.
1. When E* decided to produce a DVR, they went and licensed technology from Microsoft, who had licensed the TIVO patents. Legal.
2. When they decided to go to their own PVRs, they could have licensed the TIVO patents, but decided to ignore them. This is actually a fairly common practice. Wait and see what happens. In many cases, patents are not defended. I worked for years as an R&D engineer at HP. We put out tons of patents and seldom sued anybody. Instead, we used them as trading material to avoid being sued. This works for a company that is constantly pushing the technology envelope. Of course, now that HP is doing me-too stuff, they are more agressive at sueing for patent infringement.
3. DISH could have aggressively looked for ways of invalidating the TIVO patents. They are probably doing that now, but I expect that at least some of them will stand up. They already have.
4. DISH could have figured out ways of accomplishing the same thing without violating patents. Perhaps by not allowing the live feature, or by forcing a recording when you wanted to do the pause. They didn't because the TIVO technology was a better answer.
Now that they have lost the judgement, they are down to 3 alternatives:
1. They could stop selling the PVR, and disable PVR functions on all existing products. This is what the judgement calls fo, and what will happen unless one of the other alternatives is met.
2. They can give in and pay TIVO the license fee which will now be higher than if they had just done so in the first place.
3. They can buy TIVO and its patents. HP did that with Colorado Memory systems several years ago when they were sued for groundwater pollution seeping onto CMS land. As others have mentioned, it is probably cheaper to purchase TIVO than to pay licenses. They could then tell Cable vision to cease and desist
4. They can try and get the patents overturned. IMHO, this is a losing strategy as they have already been upheld in court.
Whining about how this is inconvient for you and how this shouldn't be allowed serves no purpose. It's a good patent and TIVO has chosen to defend it. We can only hope that Charlie will make a deal and not force the sets to be turned off.
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jayn_j said:No, everybody else who wanted to make a VHS recorder paid JVC a ROYALTY for its patented technology. Same way that everyone who makes a DVD player pays Phillips for its patent on optical recording, even though laserdisk players are dead.
This is getting tiring, folks. The world is not they way you wish it to be, it is the way it is. The fact is, right or wrong, TIVO has essential patents that the court has ruled are being violated by E*
How would you all feel if you managed to patent your really cool fish wiggler and then someone with more money went out and started building a slightly different fish wiggler, but they had more money from their fishing reel business and could market at a higher level? Would you try to do something to protect the market you had created? Would you try to stop the other guy from driving you into bankruptcy? Of course you would.
When DISH got into this, they had several choices.
1. When E* decided to produce a DVR, they went and licensed technology from Microsoft, who had licensed the TIVO patents. Legal.
2. When they decided to go to their own PVRs, they could have licensed the TIVO patents, but decided to ignore them. This is actually a fairly common practice. Wait and see what happens. In many cases, patents are not defended. I worked for years as an R&D engineer at HP. We put out tons of patents and seldom sued anybody. Instead, we used them as trading material to avoid being sued. This works for a company that is constantly pushing the technology envelope. Of course, now that HP is doing me-too stuff, they are more agressive at sueing for patent infringement.
3. DISH could have aggressively looked for ways of invalidating the TIVO patents. They are probably doing that now, but I expect that at least some of them will stand up. They already have.
4. DISH could have figured out ways of accomplishing the same thing without violating patents. Perhaps by not allowing the live feature, or by forcing a recording when you wanted to do the pause. They didn't because the TIVO technology was a better answer.
Now that they have lost the judgement, they are down to 3 alternatives:
1. They could stop selling the PVR, and disable PVR functions on all existing products. This is what the judgement calls fo, and what will happen unless one of the other alternatives is met.
2. They can give in and pay TIVO the license fee which will now be higher than if they had just done so in the first place.
3. They can buy TIVO and its patents. HP did that with Colorado Memory systems several years ago when they were sued for groundwater pollution seeping onto CMS land. As others have mentioned, it is probably cheaper to purchase TIVO than to pay licenses. They could then tell Cable vision to cease and desist
4. They can try and get the patents overturned. IMHO, this is a losing strategy as they have already been upheld in court.
Whining about how this is inconvient for you and how this shouldn't be allowed serves no purpose. It's a good patent and TIVO has chosen to defend it. We can only hope that Charlie will make a deal and not force the sets to be turned off.
The problem with your arguement is that it assumes that TIVO has invented something. I admit they were given patents on what they would like to call "technology". But the idea to record live TV to a hard drive is not an invention, nor is the idea of skipping a set amount of TV with a button, and the idea of a pause button is also not technology these are all common sense. And I am very glad that DISH has refused to pay TIVO money for their non-inventions. I know DISH is doing it to save money not for any higher reasons but I do not care. And I hope this forces the patent office to stop issuing patents for non-inventions.
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MacKenzieIII said:
Whether a person has invented something depends soley on the judgement of the patent office, and verified by the courts. If the patent was granted, and especially if it has been upheld in court, then by definition something has been invented.
Mackenzie, have you or the others who are stating that nothing was invented bother to search out the TIVO patents? Or are you just feeding on the frenzy that what is going on is so unfair?
As an exercise, here are pointers to some of the TIVO patents that most likely are being violated and which are also a basis for the suit:
Multimedia Bookmarking System (how to bookmark a place in a recorded program and automatically return
Automatic Playback overshoot correction system (predicting how to compensate for disk overshoot when fast forwarding)
Method and apparatus implementing random access and time-based functions on a continuous stream of formatted digital data (how to index within a continuous stream buffer of video data while maintaining the stream)
Method for improving bandwidth efficiency (how to optimize to ensure record integrity while viewing video and guide data)
There are a slew of other patents assigned to TIVO by their engineers. Here are my search results: US Patent Office search for TIVO in asignee field
I have to say, these don't look trivial and obvious to me. OTOH, I have never been involved in a patent where somebody hasn't come up to me and said it was obvious and trivial AFTER it was granted a patent. Science tends to be incremental and yiou can't railroad until it's time to railroad.
That is the problem with software patents. The same data structures and code is simply applied to different typs of data. It seems bogus to me that just because they are now manipulating data that happens to be "video" that all the old coding techniques become a new invention. Doing a binary search in sorted data (i.e. guessing how far out to seek in a file, if too far backing up, halfing the distance up and down to get to the desired data) now being an Automatic Playback overshoot correction system? New name for doing the same thing, just now the data happens to be video with time stamps as the sorted index key.
For many years computers have collected instument data in laboratories in real time and allowed scientists to look at the data and analyse, index it, sort it while more data was still being collected. But now you have a method and apparatus of implementing random access and time based functions on a continuous stream of formatted digital data... A new thing? Same functions on video data...
Having a list of data base pointers in a file to jump to certain records... Now is a Multimedia Bookmarking system...
Software patents need to be for completely new concepts, not applying old concepts to new types of data, which really when it comes down to it is a sequence of 1s and 0s which is what they have been processing for years.
For many years computers have collected instument data in laboratories in real time and allowed scientists to look at the data and analyse, index it, sort it while more data was still being collected. But now you have a method and apparatus of implementing random access and time based functions on a continuous stream of formatted digital data... A new thing? Same functions on video data...
Having a list of data base pointers in a file to jump to certain records... Now is a Multimedia Bookmarking system...
Software patents need to be for completely new concepts, not applying old concepts to new types of data, which really when it comes down to it is a sequence of 1s and 0s which is what they have been processing for years.
mike123abc said:
You raise some good points Mike. When i started in this business (BTW, I'm heavily involved in Data Acq) the US Patent Office did not allow software patents at all, instead relying on copyrights of source code. The law was changed in the '80s because so much of technology advancement was being accomplished through software and small companies were being crushed through infringement of unpatentable software concepts.
If you deny software patents, where do you draw the line? Is firmware included? How about programming of an FPGA? Those suckers are the basis of most new electronic designs, yet the work is 80% software. Our small company is currently in the filing process of several patents. They all involve some concept in remote sensing, and they all involve FPGA instantiation of large gate arrays. We are a very small company, and we survive on being nimble, at the leading edge and on our ability to patent essential technology. If we didn't have patent protection, the big boys would just move in and crush us. They pretty much do anyway, but this at least gives us some recourse.
Actually, I see nothing special about software in terms of applying new technology. All inventions are built on the back of previous technology. This is proven by the fact that 100 years later, they are still arguing about who invented radio, the automobile and even the telephone. Inventions are incremental.
Take for example the cotton gin. This is a prime example of the US patent system, but if you examine it carefully, it works on the principle of combing the cotton and letting the seeds and husks drop out after the comb passes through. But, hey, the comb has been around for at least 10,000 years. You could make the argument that this invention was simply applying the well known principle of the comb to a new application. And that is exactly the point.
Ask yourself, "how much has your life improved because you didn't have to settle for the first way something was done, but somebody was able to patent and market an improvement?"
The other issue with software patents is that prior art is almost impossible to find since unless open source software has done the same thing, no one would have access to the software to see if it was the same.
One could also view software as writing a novel. If I write a murder mystery, it would probably be close to another murder mystery somewhere since there are so many of them that have been written in the past. Should murder mystery plot devices be patented? Software is an expression of the mind.
One could also view software as writing a novel. If I write a murder mystery, it would probably be close to another murder mystery somewhere since there are so many of them that have been written in the past. Should murder mystery plot devices be patented? Software is an expression of the mind.
Good points all around.
Let us remember, the patent system is theoretically intended to benefit the public by fostering innovation. Will a successful Tivo be a good or bad thing for the public? Will it stifle improvements over Tivo? Limit advances due to the looming threat of (perhaps unreasonable) royalty payments to Tivo? Reward a company with a flawed, even failed business model, one that has never had a profitable year?
Or is this much ado about nothing?
I doubt that Dish or anybody else would be forced to shut down DVR functionality. It would quite likely spell the end of that company. Tivo knows this and is playing on it. Hopefully, the Blackberry scenario will not be repeated. But even if it is, it will likely mean we will pay a few more bucks per month, but keep our DVRs. And a few Tivo execs will get rewarded, and a few more rich lawyers will be crawling around.
Let us remember, the patent system is theoretically intended to benefit the public by fostering innovation. Will a successful Tivo be a good or bad thing for the public? Will it stifle improvements over Tivo? Limit advances due to the looming threat of (perhaps unreasonable) royalty payments to Tivo? Reward a company with a flawed, even failed business model, one that has never had a profitable year?
Or is this much ado about nothing?
I doubt that Dish or anybody else would be forced to shut down DVR functionality. It would quite likely spell the end of that company. Tivo knows this and is playing on it. Hopefully, the Blackberry scenario will not be repeated. But even if it is, it will likely mean we will pay a few more bucks per month, but keep our DVRs. And a few Tivo execs will get rewarded, and a few more rich lawyers will be crawling around.
ChetK said:
Thank-you chetK and riffjim (sorry for the late response). The one thing that bothers me about the 622 is the recent reports about it noT recording requested shows. I'll have to see if they can fix this problem (riffjim, although I appreciate the mention of the 622 being faster than the HD Tivo, all I would want is a bug free DVR).
Damn!, if I didn't have so many bill already, I would probably get E* in addition to D* [already have, for my mom]. Especially for channels like NGC HD. She would enjoy FOOD HD. I
As soon as theose channels go live and they work out the bugs (and hopefully I can subscribe w/o a contract), then I will JUST DO IT! (NO CONTRACTS! and NO! BUGS! please).
It's always funny having a new pay tv provider in the house.
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Tele-TV said:
It never happened to me.
Most likely people probably did not programmed it correctly (selected Only Once option, instead of All Episodes or New Episodes or something else like that).
Minsk1 said:
WRONG!!!
I thought the same thing until it happened to me.
Although, I can tell you that it's rare.
I have 30-40 timers set on both my 622s and they haven't missed a beat (knock on wood). Also, I've noticed that I haven't experienced any audio/video stutter since I stopped checking PQ on the HD LIL channels. I have OTA antennas so I don't really need them...except to occasionally record a show or two while the OTA tuners is being used. I'm sure others continue to experience annoying problems...perhaps the next software release will FINALLY make everyone happy.Minsk1 said:It never happened to me.
I guarantee you I know how to program a recuring timer and my 622 picks up some programs and completely misses ( missed several episodes of Desperate Housewives and I never heard the end of that!) others even when I can go into timers and see my programs are listed there to pick up all shows. Also, my HDMI output does not work (only works through Component) and now no sound through digital optical. So far this VIP622 has been a very buggy piece of frustrating junk. They have another on the way in 5 days.
I wonder where we would be if software patents were around in the 70s. Would Compaq have been able to legally reverse engineer the IBM BIOS sparking all the IBM-PC clones? If I remember the story correctly IBM was not willing to license their BIOS. The x86 platform is bascially all there is now that apple is moving away from PowerPC.
They did, thats why Kodak stopped selling its instant camera decades ago
JonUrban said:
They did, thats why Kodak stopped selling its instant camera decades ago
cfrank10 said:
Yeah, I double-checked my timer for the season finale of LOST before going out for my sons first birthday party. When we got home (about 45 minutes into the show), it was not recording it.
So, I hit the record button to record the rest of it. The next day, I watched the first 45 minutes on www.abc.com and finished watching the 1 hr. and 15 min. from the 622. We would have been screwed without abc.com. Also, I would recommend, for your wife, to check out the Desparate Housewives season finale on abc.com if she hasn't already. That may help stop the nagging.I did that already so there is still piece in the house. Thanks. Just wish E* would get bugs worked out. I had Tivo for several years with D* and never had a problem. I would never go back to D*, but would like a dependable PVR.
ChetK,
Are you aware that there is a bug in the current 622 software that causes missed timers if the SAT local channel map down is enabled?
Also, you cannot disable channel mapdown without first deleting all timers using the remapped channels. Since turning this off I have not missed ANY timers (even with 3 simultaneous events).
This has been throughly discussed. Try some searches.
Are you aware that there is a bug in the current 622 software that causes missed timers if the SAT local channel map down is enabled?
Also, you cannot disable channel mapdown without first deleting all timers using the remapped channels. Since turning this off I have not missed ANY timers (even with 3 simultaneous events).
This has been throughly discussed. Try some searches.
