Updated: Court blocks Permanent Injuction ordering DISH DVRs disabled

TruckStuff said:
OK, so as someone who was planning on signing up for Dish DVR this week, should I still do it? Or wait and see what happens? I really wanted to get one up and running before the fall TV season starts in a few weeks.

PS - Sorry if this has been asked, but I didn't read all 14 pages of this thread. :p

Why not? This is all about money. You will be very happy with DISH and if you are HD ready you will be even more pleased. Enjoy today and don't wait on your install.
 
Bottom line is Dish can still sells DVRs at this time.

The apeal will be heard. And as long as it takes for appeals to be heard most likely the Dish case against Tivo will be heard before the appeal is heard.

Now looking into my Crystal Ball I see Dish winning their lawsuit against Tivo.
And Dish and Tivo agreeing to cross license their patents.

Because if and when Dish wins their lawsuit against Tivo it could very well put Tivo out of business. Tivo doesn't have deep pockets like Dishnetwork has.

Tivo says Dish violated a 2001 "time warp" patent

The Dish lawsuit says Tivo violated a 1998 "Interruption Tolerant Video Program Viewing" patent as well as a 2003 "Multimedia Direct Access Storage Device and Formatting Method" patent and a "Method and System for Recording In-Progress Broadcast programs" patent.

All the legal wrangling is far from over. But realistically Tivo's days may be numbered.
 
I think Echostar is going to be doing a lot of software updates. It would give a Dish a lot more negotiating power so that they can push Tivo to settle out of court.

i just hope they can roll out the changes as soon as possible so that we don't lose DVR service.
 
Geronimo said:
The speculation has been that the 7x00s did not considered to infringe on any patents. But if what you say about the 622 is correct those may be what is efereed to. In any event the injunction has been stayed.

I believe the story is....

The 7x00 is a Microsoft designed product, and Microsoft has an intellectual property agreement in place with TiVo.
 
zman said:
Yes, but you can only do it for driving west. I have already filed for the other three major directions of travel. :D
Ok I'll use the take off and landing procedures, that my Grand-Grand-Father invented when he invented the first motorized airplane. Thousands of take-offs and landings on airports in this country will we a nice cut!:D :D
 
The ViP622 isn't listed in the court papers simply because it didn't exist when they were drawn up. There is a blurb in there about future DVRs which are based on the same platform or software, and the 622 is most definitely based on the 942/625/522 Linux code.

The 7x00 is the "non infringing" one. Even TiVo is not stupid enough to sue Microsoft. (their Windows XP Media Center has "TiVo-like features" doesn't it? :)
 
riffjim4069 said:
Not a war...just Charlie being too cheap to pay Tivo for licensing. Actually, the legal bills will probably add up to just as much as paying Tivo, but I'm on E* side on this one...the Tivo patent is too generic IMO. Apparently D* and Comcast decided it wasn't worth the fight and/or perhaps they would rather pay for licensing the software.
Do you argue with yourself a lot ? :D
 
Greg Bimson said:
Interesting.

TiVo, for lack of a better term, invented the ability to play, pause, rewind and fast-forward a recorded show while another show is recording, with a method that doesn't require two or more processors (which would make the DVR cost-prohibitive).

Why should Dish Network be allowed to rip that off?

What's this two or more processors business? I will grant you that I don't have a copy of either the Dish or Tivo software nor schematics in front of me, but in theory, given a halfway modern multitasking operating system, you can have two or more files open in read or write mode at any given time, including reading from one while writing to it. That the files might be interpretable as video data is irrelevant to the underlying computer science.
 
Quote from veggas AVS:

First the patent infringement has nothing to do with HDTV at all, but the use of Tivo's patented "Multimedia time warping system" as described in these two pages:

www.taletyano.com
www.freepatentsonline.com

A multimedia time warping system. The invention allows the user to store selected television broadcast programs while the user is simultaneously watching or reviewing another program. A preferred embodiment of the invention accepts television (TV) input streams in a multitude of forms, for example, National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) or PAL broadcast, and digital forms such as Digital Satellite System (DSS), Digital Broadcast Services (DBS), or Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC). The TV streams are converted to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation and are parsed and separated it into video and audio components. The components are stored in temporary buffers. Events are recorded that indicate the type of component that has been found, where it is located, and when it occurred. The program logic is notified that an event has occurred and the data is extracted from the buffers. The parser and event buffer decouple the CPU from having to parse the MPEG stream and from the real time nature of the data streams which allows for slower CPU and bus speeds and translate to lower system costs. The video and audio components are stored on a storage device and when the program is requested for display, the video and audio components are extracted from the storage device and reassembled into an MPEG stream which is sent to a decoder. The decoder converts the MPEG stream into TV output signals and delivers the TV output signals to a TV receiver. User control commands are accepted and sent through the system. These commands affect the flow of said MPEG stream and allow the user to view stored programs with at least the following functions: reverse, fast forward, play, pause, index, fast/slow reverse play, and fast/slow play.
[Some] Other DVR makers have been utilizing a different approach and only being able to use a single tuner on a single stream (dual tuners utilize this twice) that directly access that same stream that is being recorded, and not buffered. This is one of the sticking points many SA users have complained about - when trying to view a current recording, it brings you in at the live point in the same stream and summarily ends as the recording does and kicks you to live viewing. Recent developments in DVR technlogy have enabled SA to start at the beginning of that same stream without infringing on this specific Tivo patent.

DirecTV tried to implement their own approach, but long after the patents were given and have used similar technology to Tivo, that could be envisioned as a patent infringement. Rather than going through a court battle and possibly losing, like Echostar has, DirecTV made an agreement with Tivo that puts them in a situation where they will not get sued over patent rights.

Make no mistake, Echostar did lose the lawsuit many months ago. What they have been doing is trying to delay the proceedings as long as possible. What Tivo just did was to bring that fact back up to the courts and get a 30 day ruling to get things moving. Echostar was able to get a "TEMPORARY BLOCK ON THE INJUNCTION" to buy some time and to keep selling equipment. This does not mean they won any court battle, just delayed the injunction.
If indeed Scientific Atlanta was able to find a way around this patent with its recent DVR hardware, perhaps Dish Network can as well. After all, Tivo's patented method is intended to reduce the hardware requirements necessary to produce a DVR. Stick more powerful processors and memory in the box and it sounds like alternative, non-infringing methods become more feasible.

I guess the question is whether the current Dish hardware is capable of supporting these alternative methods. I would guess not, or presumably Dish Network would have made those changes months ago. If what's said about Scientific Atlanta is true, then future Dish DVR products will probably incorporate higher-performance hardware to implement non-infringing methods of the functionality described in the Multimedia time warping patent.
 
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long_time_DNC said:
Ok, so what's E* going to do to make our DVRs less Tivo-like? That whole proposed scenario just makes really uncomfortable...
It makes me uncomfortable too. Especially since I'm not leasing my 922. I just bought it 2 months ago.
 
long_time_DNC said:
Ok, so what's E* going to do to make our DVRs less Tivo-like? That whole proposed scenario just makes really uncomfortable...

Change menus, alter features, remove features. Basically edit the items that are claimed to infringe on the patents.

They probably don't even need to be major changes for some things.

I think it's something they can do, but i see some bad firmwares and buggy features ahead. That is if they decide not to settle with Tivo.
 
riffjim4069 said:
Tivo patents reeks of Amazon's "One-Click Shopping" patent that was later ruled as being too generic a concept to be afforded patent protection. I still say you people owe me gazillions for My "Breathing Air" patent.:rolleyes:
Don't admit it if you have the patent for air. Al Gore will sue you because it is too polluted and causing global warming.:D
 
Ken F said:
If indeed Scientific Atlanta was able to find a way around this patent with its recent DVR hardware, perhaps Dish Network can as well.

If what's said about Scientific Atlanta is true, then future Dish DVR products will probably incorporate higher-performance hardware to implement non-infringing methods of the functionality described in the Multimedia time warping patent.
Pioneer's Aptiv division, which writes software for set-top boxes has "solved" this issue. Customers with Scientific Atlanta's 8000 and 8300 DVRs had this "jump to live tv" issue for some time but Pioneer got it working. I don't know if SA, which has their own version of software for their set-tops, called SARA, has figured it out or not. Heh, Dish could write Pioneer a nice check for the solution that they implement in their code. :D
 

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