Alviso, Calif. – TiVo (NASD: TIVO) said on Wednesday that the United
States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sitting en banc has ruled in
its favor in the company’s long-running patent dispute with EchoStar (NASD: SATS) and DISH
Network (NASD: DISH). The court upheld a lower court’s finding that EchoStar and DISH acted
in contempt of an injunction against including TiVo’s patented digital video
recorder technology in their own set-top boxes. "We look forward to the
permanent injunction against EchoStar and Dish Network finally being enforced
with respect to the DVRs they must now disable," TiVo said in a statement.
"This ruling also paves the way for TiVo to receive substantial damages
and contempt sanctions regarding the DVRs that EchoStar and Dish Network failed
to disable."
The dispute is now remanded to a lower court, which is now
empowered to order DISH to disable potentially millions of digital video
recorders in its subscribers’ homes.
"We intend to seek review of the
decision by the United States Supreme Court and seek a stay of the injunction
while doing so," DISH and EchoStar said in a statement.
"We also will
be making a motion to dissolve the injunction based on Tivo’s recent
representations to the Patent and Trademark Office substantially limiting the
scope of the claims at issue in this case.
"Existing DISH Network
customers with DVRs are not immediately impacted by these recent developments.
The disablement ruling covers only certain older generation MPEG2 DVRs. We have
already upgraded many of these customers and, if we are unsuccessful in
obtaining a stay, we will work as quickly as possible to upgrade the remaining
customers to our current generation DVRs, as these are not at issue in the ruling."
Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/44cubh4
(TiVo statement)
http://tinyurl.com/3o69d6l
(DISH statement)
http://tinyurl.com/434693l
(Reuters)
