For those of you who worry about your VIPS, The progression of this into the future is fairly easy to chart.
First, at any point, Dish has the choice to settle with TiVO. If they do, they will have to deal with a smallish charge per receiver per month going forward until 2018. It is not in TiVo's interest to make that exhorbitant or else it will discourage people from using DVRs, which would reduce revenue.
Anyway, Dish always has the choice to settle at any point in the following process.
But we all know that's not going to happen. I don't know why, but somewhere somehow this has gotten personal.
The first thing DISH has done is to ask for an Appeal to the full appeals court. This will likely take months to decide. All the while the stay of the order is in force.
If that is denied, Dish can appeal to the Supreme Court. More months pass with the stay still in place.
OVER THE COURSE OF THE APPEALS, the number of offending DVRs will continue to drop because people like me will replace them in the natural order of things (I just replaced a 508 with a 612).
Dish could decide to accelerate this through promotion (Mine was free).
But Let's assume that Dish Eventually loses.
Then they would have 30-days to pay up and disable the old DVRs. At that point, Dish would most likely replace all the offending DVRs as part of an all-out switch to MPEG4.
WE ARE PROBABLY AT LEAST SIX MONTHS AWAY FROM THIS POINT. More likely a year. And nothing has been done about the VIPs.
Then the ball would be in TiVO's court. Do they try to include the ViPs? I am not a lawyer but I write software and have designed hardware so I am aware of patent issues. And I know someone who has taken Tivos and Dish DVRs (old and VIP) apart to examine what they do.
The problem Tivo faces is that the VIPs were not included early enough in the process so I don't think you could just "tack on" the VIPs without a whole separate hearing process.
Let's say TiVO takes the DISH money and follows this path. This Hearing would be long and convoluted. Because the VIPs are so much more complicated and do so much more than the old DVRs, examining and documenting how they work in order to explain it to a judge or even an expert special master would take many months, and that would be before the hearing even starts. Discovery could take a year.
A hearing could last more than a month.
Then you are looking at six months to come up with a decision (maybe longer).
IF WE FOLLOWED THIS PATH, IF we get a decision that the VIPs infringe, it might not be until 2012 or 2013. And this kind of decision would be appealable.
The last issue with the hearing is that one has to remember that the VIPs were designed AFTER TiVO filed suit. This means that unless the engineers were totally incompetent, they had to design a back-door way to make the thing work in the event that Tivo prevailed in the suit.
So in the end, we are a very long way from having the VIPs turned off. They will be replaced by something else first.