TiVo Faces Patent-Infringement Countersuits By AT&T, Verizon [telecom]

TiVo Faces Patent-Infringement Countersuits By AT&T, Verizon

Telcos Cite Their Own Patent Porfolios in Complaints

By Todd Spangler Multichannel News

3/31/2010

The telcos have struck back: AT&T and Verizon Communications have separately filed countersuits against TiVo -- which previously sued both telcos over patents -- alleging the DVR company is infringing their intellectual property.

The countersuits were detailed in TiVo's 10-K annual report filed Wednesday.

Separately, TiVo is awaiting the resolution of its six-year-old litigation against Dish Network and EchoStar, which have been ordered to pay $300 million in damages and sanctions to the DVR company. Last week, the Texas district court judge overseeing the case gave Dish an extension until April 30 on a previously issued stay on the injunction ordering the satellite TV operator to disable infringing DVRs.

Perhaps emboldened by a legal victory over Dish and EchoStar last summer, TiVo filed separate lawsuits in August 2009 against AT&T and Verizon.

TiVo argued that the DVRs provided with AT&T's U-verse TV and Verizon's FiOS TV infringed three TiVo patents: U.S. Patent Nos.

6,233,389 B1 ("Multimedia Time Warping System") -- the one that Dish and EchoStar were found to have violated -- as well as 7,529,465 B2 ("System for Time Shifting Multimedia Content Streams") and 7,493,015 B1 ("Automatic Playback Overshoot Correction System").

Now TiVo is the target of countersuits from AT&T and Verizon.

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