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Dish Network says it plans to pay TiVo the $104 million judgment in the next few days.
Dish Network was issued quite a blow yesterday. The Supreme Court rejected the satellite provider’s appeal against the $74 million judgment, which was issued for violating TiVo’s patent on DVR technology.
The court had no comment. In January, they had plenty to say, ruling that DVRs distributed by Dish Network violated some of the software elements in TiVo’s patent, specifically the “time warp” feature, which allows viewers to watch one TV program while recording another.
As a result, Dish and EchoStar Corp. will have to pay $104 million in damages to TiVo. Dish said they have the money in escrow and the whole thing should be behind them in the next few days—maybe. There’s still a matter of whether or not Dish will owe them more. As part of the injunction, Dish was required to shut off its DVRs, which they did not do. Instead, they continued to collect subscriber fees and issued a software “work-around,” says Reuters.
Hopefully they work it out—I’ve got a lot of stuff stocked up on my Dish DVR!
“We believe that the design-around does not infringe TiVo’s patent and that TiVo’s pending motion for contempt should be denied,” Dish said in a statement. “We look forward to that ruling in the near future.”
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The real losers will be the consumers. Regardless of how much Dish has to pay to keep tivio from making them shut down most if not all of the DVRs out there. The cost will be passed on to us consumers, and probably disabled functionality. Between in-fighting between the company’s and restriction placed on broadcasters, and eventually hardware makers by media owners,ie; studios, distrubtors,in other words DRM and limiting consumers use of “fair use” over time, This could defiantly be a blow in that direction in the long run.
You can bet that Dish will find a way to keep their DVRS working, Worst case they would have to do a major download and put all new software on every machine out there, that would take some time and doing, The only other option is to physically replace every unit out there. That would be a epic project.