Do I take Gemstar lightly? No. (Although I'm not yet convinced american's want Smart Cards - some trials have failed. Maybe it's just too early).
The only question in my mind is whether or not Gemstar's patents will prevent TVGIA from releasing their product, or will cause Gemstar to sue TVGIA and have the product removed after it has been released. If the answer to that question is "no," then I'm not concerned about the impact on IATV.
You mention transmission of data via HTML via audio, RF, cable, satellite, and telephony as part of Gemstar's patent portfolio. Gemstar patenting some of those things is equivalent to that guy who patented e-commerce. Yeah, one guy has the patent for sending credit card information over TCP/IP using HTML forms and such, plus some stuff that enables it on the backend. The 98 year old guys working in the patent office in Washington will grant a patent for almost anything. You know Priceline.com has patented their whole product as well... I'd like to see Gemstar defend some of them in court. DirecPC sends a bunch of HTML via Satellite, for example.
Same thing could possibly be said about IATV's patents, don't get me wrong. And I believe a poster here said several months ago when this very topic came up, that IATV's goal would be to license the patents to make money off of them rather than spend money fighting in court.
But back to Gemstar, I have done very little dd on that company and wouldn't have any problem if they succeeded, so long as it doesn't interfere with IATV's rollout with TVGIA. If you think that the interactive TV Guide software is going to be halted due to a conflict with Gemstar, could you please enlighten us as to why?
Thanks,
-Mike |
