On April 1, 2016, Rovi Corporation filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Comcast in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division. In the complaint, which is quite detailed and very long (174 pages), Rovi is asking for a preliminary injunction, a finding that Comcast’s infringement is willful and deliberate, a finding that the case is exceptional and attorneys fees’ are appropriate, as well as damages for the infringement.

The lawsuit alleges that 12 years ago, Comcast took a license to Rovi’s patent portfolio, but that license expired on March 31, 2016, without being renewed. Rovi says that Comcast has failed to remove any of its products and services from the market and also continues to provide those products and services, all of which are now infringing because of the expiration of the patent license agreement.

“We disagree with Rovi’s accusations and intend to defend the cases vigorously,” said Jenni Moyer, Senior Director of Corporate Communications for Network & Operations at Comcast.  “Beyond that, we can’t comment on pending litigation.”

According to Rovi, it has invested over a billion dollars in research and development for its products and intellectual property over the past 25 years in order to create one of the world’s largest media and entertainment patent portfolios. According to the complaint, Rovi has invested over $300 million in research and development just since 2013, and has over 800 U.S.-based full-time employees supporting the development of new products and platforms.

A press release issued by Rovi explains that the company’s patent portfolio consists of more than 5,000 issued patents and pending applications worldwide, which is broadly licensed throughout the North American pay-TV industry and by eight of the top 10 U.S. service providers, including AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications. The complaint says that Rovi has amassed a patent portfolio of over 1,200 issued U.S. patents and 500 pending U.S. patent applications.

Rovi says that many of the patents in their current patent portfolio were not in the portfolio at the time Comcast originally entered into its licensing deal some 12 years ago. These newly patented technologies in the Rovi portfolio, which they say consumers have come to expect, include video-on-demand, whole-home DVR technology, and robust mobile access to and control of in-home set-top boxes.

The patents asserted by Rovi in this action are:

• U.S. Patent No. 8,713,595, titled Interactive program guide systems and processes, which relates to television program guide systems and particularly to interactive television program guide systems and related processes that can automatically tune a television, or program a video cassette recorder (VCR), based on program selections made from program schedule information displayed on a television or other suitable video monitor. More particularly, this invention relates to interactive television program guide systems and related processes that provide an intuitive search utility for allowing a viewer to locate programs of interest by applying a restrictive search selection criterion and a nonrestrictive sort attribute to program schedule information.
• U.S. Patent No. 8,755,666, titled Interactive television program guide with remote access, which relates to interactive television program guide video systems, and more particularly, to interactive television program guide systems that provide remote access to program guide functionality.
• U.S. Patent No. 7,996,864, titled Method and apparatus for displaying television programs and related text, which relates particularly to a method and apparatus for simultaneously displaying video programs and related text on a television screen.
• U.S. Patent No. 9,172,987, titled Methods and systems for updating functionality of a set-top box using markup language, which relates to video systems, and more particularly, to interactive television program guide systems which provide for the flexible modification of program guide user screen layouts and program guide functionality.
• U.S. Patent No. 7,895,218, titled Method and system for performing searches for television content using reduced text input, which generally relates to a method and system for performing searches for television content and, more particularly, to a method and system for performing searches with text entry by a user reduced to prefix substrings representing elements of a namespace containing a set of names composed of one or more words that are either ordered or unordered.
• U.S. Patent No. 8,122,034, titled Method and system for incremental search with reduced text entry where the relevance of results is a dynamically computed function of user input search string character count, which covers a method and system for processing a search request received from a user operating a text input device and for performing searches for television content, channels and other items.
• U.S. Patent No. 8,433,696, titled Method and system for processing ambiguous multiterm searches queries, which generally relates to processing search queries and, more particularly, to methods and systems for processing ambiguous, reduced text, multi-term search queries.
• U.S. Patent No. 6,725,281, titled Synchronization of controlled device state using state table and eventing in data-driven remote device control model, which relates generally to dynamic connectivity among distributed devices and services, and more particularly relates to providing a capability to access device- or service-specific operational information and perform remote automation and control of embedded computing devices using a data-driven remote programming model, such as in a pervasive computing environment.

Tags: Comcast, Eastern District of Texas, patent, patent infringement, Patent Litigation, patents, Rovi Corporation

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