Fri, 18 Aug 2006

TiVo gets injunction against EchoStar

Picture the headline in 1920 - "Ford Gets Injunction Against General Motors", in which Ford claimed all ownership of the intellectual concept of "automobile", and won.

Mercifully, we didn't have such screwed up courts or laws back then.

But more importantly, entrepreneurs of the day weren't so litigious, either:

[lawsuits] provide opportunities for little minds to usurp the gains of genuine innovators and under the smug protest of righteousness, work a hold-up game in the most approved fashion.
-- Henry Ford

AP - TiVo Inc. said Friday that a court ruled against EchoStar Communications Corp., saying it must halt the manufacture and sale of its DVR products in the U.S., and ordered it to pay more than $89 million in damages to the digital video recorder maker.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

/Copywrongs | 1 writeback | permanent link

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On 8/18/2006 14:25:00
Walter Jeffries wrote

The whole patent system is absurd. It was barely good in its origin but it has been turned into a way of abusing others by holding patents and laying in wait for someone else to be successful or locking others out of a market for reasonable ideas. Part of the issue is that just coming up with an idea, even doing a full design, is but one small part of successfully bringing it to market. Ideas are a dime a dozen. I come up with more than ten good patentable ideas a day. It would be absurd for me to patent them and lock up the ideas from others being able to make use of them. Another part is that many people come up with similar or even the same ideas. Give 100 engineers the same problem and almost all of them of them will come up with good working ideas - only about a handful of different ideas. The patent system is supposed to be for non-obvious ideas. Well everything is obvious once you think about it long enough. Awarding a monopoly on an idea to anyone is stealing from others. Frankly, the patent system should be discarded. The reward should be in the free market sale of the products - sink or swim. I speak as a successful inventor who has refused to ever patent anything.

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