Cable giants being sued for VOD patent infringement

If nothing else, you've got to admire the tenacity of a Connecticut-based firm called USA Video Interactive, which just days after losing what seems to be a final appeal in its lawsuit against Movielink, decided to go after almost all of the country's major cable operators for supposedly infringing on the same patent. Comcast, Cox, Charter, and Time Warner (disclosure: Time Warner owns the company that owns the network that includes Engadget) are all named in a suit filed Tuesday in a U.S. District Court in Texas by USA Video (maybe Cablevision got spared because of all its other legal woes), which claims that like Movielink, the cable giants are violating its so-called Store-and-Forward Video-on-Demand patent (#5,130,792, filed in 1990) by using protected technology in their own VOD services. Besides making patents, the company also offers various products revolving around email, web tools, digital video watermarking, and content delivery infrastructure, so it's probably not appropriate to bunch it in with other lawsuit-happy -- but seemingly less legitimate -- claimants such as NTP and Visto.

[Via TechWeb and Digital Media Thoughts]

[shirizaki @ Jun 17th 2006 10:01AM]

Instead of making something new, everyone seems to sue everyone else for "patents". I mean, yeah its important to protect whats yours, but in the long run all you do is drive up the costs for consumers with frivilous lawsuits.

[TZK @ Jun 17th 2006 10:10AM]

What a great article about a cool new gadget!

[p-diddy @ Jun 17th 2006 10:46AM]

TZK, some of us are very interested in what is going on in the cable industry being TiVo, VOD, and TV gadget-freaks. Including law suits.

While I don't have an opinion on USA Interactive's patent or the case, I think people in general do not understand why patents are important and that patent law suits are not automatically frivolous. Patents encourage people to disclose their solutions to a particular problem to the world. In exchange, you get a limited monopoly on that solution. The law states that you have legal rights against anyone that is infringing on that solution. All these patent holders are doing is exercising their legal rights.

We, as consumers and the little guy, feel that when someone we've never heard of sues our cable provider, it is automatically a bogus law suit and that the patent system is out of control. It's not. And NTP, while I don't their patents were actually infringed by RIM, is a good example of this. The NTP guys solved a problem years before any one else had. But their business failed. The patent was all they had, but by law, that was their legal right to exercise. Yet everyone denounced them as patent trolls because they were taking on the company that everyone liked.

There are problems with the patent system, yes, but people need to pull their heads out of their asses and not jump to conclusions about the validity of any and all patent suits.

-p-

[gman @ Jun 17th 2006 2:36PM]

"I think people in general do not understand why patents are important and that patent law suits are not automatically frivolous."

You're right most people don't understand patents or their effects on our society.

Most lawsuits that are reported are bogus and are being reported because there is something bogus about them.

Patents in the U.S. have 2 problems:

1) The types of patents allowed have been expanded to include business and process patents. This mean that ideas themselves are patentable, without having any specific implementation.

These hurt the software industry more that help. Ideas cover huge grounds. Patents where originaly only for specific inovations not ideas.

2) The patent process has serveral flaws. A big one is that applicants self police themselves. It is up to them to report any previous works of art.

The patent office is over worked and can't do proper research and are not experts in very technical areas. With out this knowledge, it is imposible to root out obvious inovations (ex: single click, 3 degrees patents...).

Even worse is the practice of allowing patents so that it becomes the responsiblity of the courts to resolve any conficts. They even gave a patent for swinging on a swing from left to right!

As for this specific case, they've already lost an apeal. With luck there will be a patent review and they get tossed out.

[p-diddy @ Jun 17th 2006 2:50PM]

First, gman, bravo. A very well thought out comment. Thank you for continuing this topic of debate.

Second, I disagree that software should not be patentable. Though software lowers the bar implementation-wise, in that a single individual with enough time could write almost any software, I do not feel it is inherently any different than hardware, which people seem to have no problem granting patentability to. All hardware, I'm referring to any electronic circuit, is a representation of a software algorithm. Even under the argument that hardware is fixed while software is amorphous, very rarely is a system or apparatus claim written without it being abstracted at some level thereby covering equivalents to the circuit. And the patent office dropped the requirement for a working model in 1880, so it is hard to say patents were originally intended only to cover a specific implementation unless you are referring only to the Constitutional grant.

As to your self-policing argument, I have no comment on that. :-) But I will say that it is a fallacy to assume that Examiners are not technical experts. They all have at least a bachelors and many have higher degrees.

-p-

[Matt @ Jun 17th 2006 4:46PM]

I wish Comcast would actually get VOD working here.

[michikal @ Jun 17th 2006 10:26PM]

Time Warner owns EVERYTHING.

[gman @ Jun 17th 2006 11:43PM]

[Martin @ Jun 17th 2006 11:45PM]

Some patent lawsuits are frivolous and some aren't. But you shouldn't be allowed to patent a vague idea. You should only be allowed to patent specific designs so people can't copy your products exactly. It's stupid when people start patenting vague ideas like a "wireless communication device which receives relayed email" or "storing and forwarding video on demand". I could come up with that easily; as technology progresses, there are obvious next steps that anyone can see. But you should only be able to patent something once you have a specific, detailed, working way to implement it. And you should only be able to patent your specific implementation, not one some one will come up with years later independent of you.

[gman @ Jun 18th 2006 12:07AM]

note: please forgive me if this is a double post.

p-diddy,

"First, gman, bravo. A very well thought out comment. Thank you for continuing this topic of debate."

Thank you, this is one topic I get on my sopabox for.

"Second, I disagree that software should not be patentable."

I too must disagree with you on this point. All software is covered by copyright and don't require further protections. The software industry seemed to be fine before software patents came on the scene.

I have no problems with patents on algorithms or specific software implementations. Most software patents cover huge swaths of ideas and do not cover specific algorithms. My favorite examples are Open Market "Network sales system" and Acacia "video compression" patents.

Although they do have degrees, they are not much help with a moving target like software development. By the time a curiculum is developed and approved, new technologies arrive to take thier place. They have approved patents for ideas that I and my peers consider obvious or just a new take on an old idea.

One problem software has is that there is nothing tangible and unless a programmer prints out the source code, proving providence is very hard. BackBerry was recently in trouble when durring a software demonstration was thrown out, when it was pointed out that the timestamp on a file was more recent.

[p-diddy @ Jun 18th 2006 1:03AM]

OK, everyone, not to preach, but here goes: Copyright prevents people from copying. Patents have nothing to do with copying, so copyright protection is not and should not give you the same protection as a patent. Copyright is not enough because code by definition is functional in nature and copyright does not cover functionality. Proving someone copied your code is a lot harder than proving patent infringement, and that can be applied to any technical art.

re: the blackberry eveidence, THEY TAMPERED WITH THE CODE for the demonstration. They are lucky they didn't get sanctioned.

Software development is no more a moving target than molecular biology or hardware engineering. Compare processors today with those of 5 years ago (slow x86-32 vs. 64). Or bus architectures (AGP v. PCI-Express). Or sound cards/audio.

I didn't follow the printing out source code argument so I can't respond. Sorry.

I love this topic though I know I don't have a popular viewpoint. Sadly many of these such debates get derailed before they ever get good.

Thank you for sharing your perspective.

-p-

[Per @ Jun 18th 2006 6:13AM]

This is indeed an interesting discussion so far. :)

Most content providers and the like actually were consumers first and most consumers get something from content providers and their ilk that they could not or would prefer not to provide on their own. Seems like a symbiotic relationship, right? In order for that to work, the content provided has to continue to be compelling to consumer and the content providers have to be able to support themselves. So if companies cannot spend money researching technical innovations, software or otherwise, and feel safe that their R and D costs will be protected by a patent instead of having their work preyed upon by a competitor, how is the system supposed to work? Just my two cents.

I agree that there have been many patents issued that never should have been, like one click shopping and the like, but to say that companies that work in software should be less protected than their hardware counterparts does not seem to make sense to me. Conversely, software, by nature, can move faster than hardware. Why? Because it less frequently requires changes in manufacturing processes than hardware, especially since the widespread advent of digital transmissions. Lots of tricky issues here, and I think we can see exactly why the patent officers have such a difficult job.

[p-diddy @ Jun 18th 2006 11:24AM]

>> Conversely, software, by nature, can move faster
>> than hardware. Why? Because it less frequently
>> requires changes in manufacturing processes than
>> hardware, especially since the widespread advent
>> of digital transmissions.

I don't know. Once you hit code freeze for a project, it's difficult to make changes. I realize it often doesn't require the complete retooling of a fab setup, but you see what I mean. And on the hardware side, while one set of chips is being fabbed, there are teams already woking on the smaller faster version of that chip that will be released in 6 months. *shrug*

-p-

[jak @ Jun 18th 2006 3:14PM]

I'm surprised i haven't heard anything about this on the local news here in Connecticut

[Ray Subs @ Jun 13th 2009 6:27PM]

I think strong patents help to minimize patent infringement and increase patent enforcement and that is exactly what is needed to stop the big companies from taking advantage of the little guy! I found some great information relating to this topic at http://www.generalpatent.com/patent-infringement