TiVo’s dust up with Dish may get all of the ink love, but in reality, it represents a very small part of their patent portfolio. Between their trademark filings, their patent applications and their aggressive open market acquisitions, TiVo has managed to build a very impressive intellectual property portfolio around their technology. They haven’t always had the cash to defend this moat, but with damages from TiVo’s potential patent award against Dish, now up to $130 million 
it could free up a lot of cash to go after other infringers, if Dish loses their appeal.
Some of TiVo’s patents have obvious applications and some of them are really held more for defensive purposes, but it’s the bizarre ones that I find most interesting and on Tuesday, TiVo was issued a patent for a method of locking down hard drives, that involves creating a password, that is so hard to guess, it would take longer than the expected life of your hard drive for someone to crack. According to the patent document, the method is described as the following.
An authentication system for securing information within a disk drive to be read and written to only by a specific host computer such that it is difficult or impossible to access the drive by any system other than a designated host is disclosed. While the invention is similar in intent to a password scheme, it significantly more secure. The invention thus provides a secure environment for important information stored within a disk drive. The information can only be accessed by a host if the host can respond to random challenges asked by the disk drive. The host’s responses are generated using a cryptography chip processing a specific algorithm. This technique allows the disk drive and the host to communicate using a coded security system where attempts to break the code and choose the correct password take longer to learn than the useful life of the disk drive itself.
At first the whole thing seems pretty silly to me, but when I think about it, I see two ways that TiVo could take this technology.