Motorola Mobility Holdings has launched a claim challenging TiVo’s assertion that it was the inventor of certain digital video recording technologies, according to papers lodged with a Texas federal court. In the complaint Motorola states TiVo infringed patents and is seeking a ruling that Verizon Communications set-top boxes do not use technologies created by TiVo. The move could be seen as a tit for tat reaction to a 2009 case brought by TiVo against Verizon that claimed the FiOS IPTV service was in violation of its own patents.
The Motorola argument centres around the old General Instrument division, and a company called Imedia, that had created what are described as “fundamental inventions related to digital video recorders” in the mid-1990s two years before TiVo was formed and filed its own patent claims.
TiVo’s technology continues to be at the heart of a number of bitterly fought actions that are still before the US courts. Key to these is the 2004 lawsuit brought against former Echostar DBS operation Dish, which is currently going through the US appeals system.
