Of course don’t tell people how TiVo’s product uses a ton of complex largely de-bugged software full of innovation that they got to use from many of the primary creators at $0 [ http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html ]

I guess TiVo would know better than to sue the gift-givers, but they have no problem suing direct competitors that likely use an idea within their product that TiVo had described overly broadly within their patent claims despite likely being a fairly natural path to take for numerous high-achieving engineers.

Really, this tells me that TiVo has no respect for the tremendous cumulative amount of hard work and creativity that has gone into the software they got for $0. Either that or they think they the open source developers are suckers. Or perhaps they feel entitled to many many billions of dollars off their $0 license fees.

When your brand takes a hit, prevent the competition from taking your customers by suing them for injunctive relief with anything at all no matter how unethical or disrespectful. [I’m not sure if this is the case here, but this came to mind since TiVo once backpeddled into using DRM to remove some nice features they had originally introduced when they were looking to make a name for themselves. In fact, TiVo’s DRM was a major motivation for the Free Software Foundation to revamp their GPL license that had been unchanged and in widespread use for about a decade and a half.]