Hasta La Gadget!

You knew it couldn’t be over, right? The long running TiVo vs. DISH / Echostar patent case took a not-so-new twist yesterday when the Patent and Trademark Office issued a preliminary finding rejecting some of the claims of its Time Warp patent. While DISH was pleased, considering the PTO’s conclusions as “highly relevant” to its ongoing appeal, TiVo issued a statement calling this step “not unusual” pointing out that the exact same thing happened when its patent was reexamined in 2005 (and subsequently upheld in 2007,) and that the next step in the process is where it will be able to present its explanation for the first time. All you need to know is that it will still be a while before anyone involved (except the two company’s lawyers) are cashing any large checks, or gets their DVR taken away.

[Via Multichannel News]

Read – TiVo Statement on Developments in Lawsuit Against EchoStar
Read – DISH Network and EchoStar Statement Regarding Tivo

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Patent Office rejects some of TiVo’s patent claims, battle vs. DISH to rage on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 09:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What you are about to read is from an actual court filing. Gregory McKenna has filed suit against Apple, which he alleges is conspiring with the mob in an effort to coerce him to return to a New York-based modeling agency he quit in 2000. As explained in the 124-page complaint, an iPod shuffle he bought on eBay in 2005 and an iPod mini he bought new from an Apple store in 2006 — possibly a nano, as minis were discontinued a year prior — both contain receivers that have allowed the Mafia to send audio death threats that play in tandem with his music. The suit seeks $14.3 million total and lists ten defendants in all, including a local mechanic, a private investigator, the St. Louis Police Department, the FBI, and the US Department of Justice. While our initial reaction is to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, it’s hard not to feel sad for McKenna and his state of mind — of course, if by some stroke of fate he manages to prove it was all one big conspiracy perpetrated by the Mafia, well, guess we’ll be ending up with egg on our faces.

[Via TUAW]

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video, Wireless

Lawsuit alleges Apple conspired with Mafia, put hidden receivers in iPods for transmitting death threats originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In a little bit of about face, Amazon‘s nixed its hefty $200 charge to replace cracked Kindle screens, and now says it will do so for free. The change comes on the heels of a lawsuit filed by a Kindle owner, who claims that the cover designed for the Kindle by Amazon caused a crack in the screen where it attaches to the device. Amazon’s story had been that cracked screens weren’t covered under the warranty, and while the company wouldn’t comment on the lawsuit, which is still active, the company issued a statement saying that anyone “who has an issue with the cover attachment mechanism to return the cover and device for a free replacement so we can investigate further.” The original plaintiff is asking that a federal court in Seattle make the case a class-action lawsuit, and his lawyers have said that they will still go forward with the complaint even though Amazon is dropping the fee. So what about you — have you cracked up your Kindle screen?

Filed under: Handhelds

Amazon drops $200 replacement fee for cracked Kindle screens originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember when we thought that those $90 million and $190 million judgments in the endless TiVo / EchoStar case were big noise? Yeah, they were apparently pocket change: according to documents recently filed with the court, TiVo’s asking for nearly a billion dollars in contempt sanctions against EchoStar. Unfortunately, the original document in which TiVo made the request was filed under seal because it contains confidential information, but it appears that TiVo’s none too pleased that EchoStar violated the permanent injunction that ordered it to disable some 193,000 DVRs in the wild, and it’s looking for some payback. For its part, EchoStar says that it doesn’t have to comply with the court’s order because the injunction was put on hold pending appeal — an argument that appears on the surface to make perfect sense, but since we can’t read TiVo’s motion we can’t say for sure what’s going on, and there’s always a chance the company’s just playing hardball in order to force a late settlement. Given the rocky history of this endless case, we doubt that’s likely, but one thing’s for certain: all these lawyers are eating well tonight.

Filed under: Home Entertainment

TiVo asks court for a billion dollars in EchoStar case originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on October 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

Back in 2006 we wrote about a consumer who had subscribed to Verizon’s unlimited broadband EVDO service only to get his account canceled for high usage.  Unlimited usually means… well, never-ending, unrestricted, or infinite.  Verizon marketed this service as such, except that they applied restrictions to the ‘unlimited’ part of it.  The man received a letter saying his usage was so high that they were canceling the service.  Never in the fine print did they say that their unlimited plan had a limit.

Then in April of this year, we noticed that Verizon had changed their terms (in the fine print of course) which outlined that their unlimited plan could only be used up to 5GB a month, otherwise usage was considered unacceptable and service would be terminated.  Shortly after we published our discovery, other sites caught on and this news spread like wildfire.  At the time we had several lawyers contact us wanting the contact information for anyone we knew of who were users of the service so that a class-action lawsuit could be filed. We didn’t provide them with any information, but knew it was only going to be a matter of time before Verizon would be in legal trouble for false advertising.

That leads us to today. Just yesterday Verizon agreed to pay $1 million dollars for their “unlimited” but limited EVDO plans.  Over 13,000 customers in all were cut-off from the service, and those customers will now be reimbursed for the hardware that they bought to use the service which no longer serves a purpose.  To get to this settlement, it took nine months of investigation to look at Verizon’s services and how they market them. Obviously they had been falsely advertising for quite some time.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cumo announced the settlement and said that Verizon was producing “misleading materials and deceptive marketing” for claiming that the plans were unlimited when they really weren’t.  He also said they “indirectly contradicted the promise of unlimited service.” Of course Verizon is no longer advertising “Unlimited Broadband Access” (apparently they don’t want another legal battle), they’re just calling it “Broadband Access” which is what it should have been called from the start.

It’s nice to see that Verizon had to face the consequences for falsely marketing and selling an unlimited service. Clearly they learned that they can’t say unlimited unless they actually mean it, and they now know that false advertising, while it may give you an increase in customers, eventually just lands you in legal trouble.

Source: Ars

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