Virgin Media wins ELEVENTH patent case against Rovi After eleven claims and seven years, Virgin has won an eleventh patent dispute with Rovi over the design of its user interface after Rovi withdrew the claim of patent infringement. The specific claim was for Electronic Programme Guide software using information downloaded from the internet. The patent is now marked as having …
Who used to be known as Macrovision. Yes, that one.
They're also the clowns who bought divx for 750 million USD - a product that as far as I've ever been able to work out has only really ever been used for piracy around the time when said pirates were all moving in droves to Matroska and h/x264 (and very few home users licensed it anyway). Either way, one of the dumbest acquisitions in history in both purpose and value (yes even when you start throwing Yahoo into the mix).
These are the clowns who think you can stop even casual content buyers from ripping media with copy protection methods that aren't even slightly secure (macrovision, ripguard et al).
Their product line was at best idiotic and at worst fraudulent (totally relied on legal means - i.e. courts/laws - and not technical means to actually prevent copying) - and reading this patent, if it's anything to go by, their patent library is even worse.
Yes let them go bust, bunch of crooks.
But they did manage to con quite a few companies into buying their useless copy protextion system. And at the same time piss off a few high end monitor users.
Oh an Macraprovision has never stopped me copying something I wanted to copy,
Except it won't work out that way. Vexation troll sues small company that can't afford a the sort of legal defense needed to win these cases and when the troll wins, the small company has to pay their fees. That only emboldens the patent trolls which is the exact opposite of what we want.
The right way to fix it is:
1) Fix US patent law so the sorts of patents that generate the suits is reduced.
2) Fix the US patent office so their case officers actually review the patents and have some knowledge relevant to the area.
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