[mythtv-users] tivo patents cover mythtv?

[Brian Wood]

On Saturday 06 March 2010 05:02:47 pm Mark Knecht wrote:

> They want royalties in the U.S. from Verizon, Time-Warner, Comcast
> right? Myth is meaningless in terms of keeping them alive.
> 
> I would still contend that as long as Myth has a defensible
> 'BitTorrent' type argument as to why it exists (and I'm not sure it
> does but something for readers to think about, playing DVDs,
> YouTube/Hulu files, etc.) and that time shifting TV is only one thing
> it does, and then only if the end-user buys the hardware and sets it
> up, then it falls to Tivo to sue every individual using Myth and not
> an individual company. It's pointless. They won't do it. We're not
> sharing TV recordings like the RIAA saw with BitTorrent and stolen
> music and movies so there's no great intellectual property issue with
> the content providers.

I agree that TiVo is unlikely to go after Myth or its users, doing so would 
violate the primary tenet of the law profession: "Never Sue Poor People".

Myth does not hurt them, and the lack of Myth would not help them.

Heck, if Tivo is looking for developers they would be well-advised to seek out 
Myth developers.

The fact that TiVo stretched the letter of the GPL to close to the breaking 
point (resulting in the GPL v3) left a bad taste with a lot of OSS advocates, 
but that's another topic.