Dish Network LLC must pay $469 million for infringing two patents held by ClearPlay Inc related to filtering material from streaming video, a jury in U.S. federal court in Utah has decided.
The jury in Salt Lake City reached its decision on Friday in ClearPlay's lawsuit against Dish, finding that the Dish's AutoHop feature for skipping commercials on its Hopper set-top boxes is covered by ClearPlay's patents.
Jurors found that Dish's technology violated ClearPlay's patent rights, but they rejected ClearPlay's argument that Dish copied its technology intentionally.
A Dish spokeswoman said on Monday that the company was disappointed in the jury's decision and will contest the verdict through an appeal. Representatives for ClearPlay did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
Salt Lake City-based ClearPlay lets users filter out adult content like sex, violence and drug use from DVDs and streaming video. In 2014, it sued Dish, alleging that AutoHop's technology for cutting commercials from DVR content violates its patents for a method of filtering multimedia content without altering the underlying video. AutoHop works differently from ClearPlay's technology, according to Englewood, Colorado-based Dish. Dish said that the patents are invalid because they are obvious based on earlier inventions or cover abstract ideas.
The case is ClearPlay Inc v. Dish Network LLC, U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, No.