WASHINGTON — TiVo lost a ruling before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over rights to technology that’s the subject of a legal dispute with Douglas County-based Dish Network and EchoStar. The agency last week issued a final rejection of two aspects of a patent that lets users record a television program and play it back at the same time. The patent-office review is a parallel proceeding to TiVo’s case before a U.S. appeals court.
The two patent claims are the same ones that a jury in 2006 said Dish and EchoStar infringed. The patent office this month found instead that the two elements under review were an obvious variation of earlier inventions and that TiVo’s rights to that aspect of the video-recording technology should never have gotten approval. Bloomberg News
