COURT SIDED WITH TIVO ON AT LEAST 2 DISPUTED PATENT CLAIMS
TiVo was granted its summary judgment by U.S. Dist. Court, Boston, in its PVR patent dispute with Pause Technology (CED Feb 12 p5) because the court found TiVo had “the better argument with respect to at least 2 disputed claim terms,” a text of the decision said.
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The ruling against Pause, which alleged in 2001 that TiVo had infringed its patent (No. 36,801), was handed down Feb. 2 by U.S. Dist. Judge Patti Saris but publicized only last week when TiVo announced it would ask the court to order Pause to pay its legal costs. Representatives for Pause have been silent on the case.
Saris said in her decision that Pause and TiVo agree that for the plaintiff to prevail on its infringement claim, “the Court must construe each of the disputed claim terms in favor of Pause’s interpretation.” Yet the judge said Pause introduced no evidence that the TiVo PVR writes “digital input signals” to “continually advancing writing addresses” (as stipulated in the Pause patent) when addresses are defined as physical addresses. Moreover, the court sided with TiVo, which argued that its PVR actually records a time interval that varies between 31 and 37 min., depending on the amount of variable compression that’s used to process a sequence of programming. The court found that was in stark contrast to a key stipulation of the Pause patent, which specified that data was to be recorded in a “predetermined,” not variable, time interval.
During hearings, the decision said, TiVo introduced evidence that in software versions 2.0 and later, the actual duration of time that input signals are received and recorded in the live TV cache varied between 31 and 27 min. because of “the use of the multi-part recording design.” TiVo said the fluctuation occurs because the live TV cache is made up of linked “recording parts” that vary in size by the complexity of the content being recorded, much as the data transfer rate of a DVD will shoot upward to handle more complex scenes in a movie. The time interval variation of 31-37 min. on a TiVo PVR actually is in contrast to what TiVo tells the viewer -- that he can pause for a total of 30 min.
Upon hearing this TiVo disclosure, the decision said, Pause changed its claim, insisting in its rebuttal that the crucial term in the patent -- “time interval of predetermined duration” -- actually could be construed to describe a system with a predetermined minimum amount of storage capacity. But the judge found that Pause’s argument failed on the very point that the TiVo PVR’s recording interval couldn’t be described as predetermined. “While the program capacity of the buffer can be increased by adjusting the compression ratio, the patent describes fixing the time interval for recording before recording begins,” the court found. “In this way, a predetermined and fixed amount of programming is stored in the buffer during operation, no matter what the compression ratio.”