Neither pat of this is surprising. The U.S. district court in Texas that heard the TiVo vs. EchoStar case issued an injunction against EchoStar, and EchoStar appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and had the injunction blocked pending the appeal. Sounds fairly standard as these things go. There’ll be a couple of following entries with TiVo’s take on this.
But, boy, imagine if they didn’t get the injunction blocked and EchoStar was forced to disable almost all of the DVRs already in the field. I imagine EchoStar customers would not be happy. And it could still happen – if they lose the appeal I expect they’re scramble to license the patents from TiVo to prevent being forced to shut down.
