The amount of electronics thrown away rather than recycled in 2007.
The EPA reports that 82% of electronics disposal in 2007 ended up in the garbage (mostly landfills) rather than a recycling center. (source: EPA, July 2008)
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The patent system is in desperate need of reform, but the case of Tivo reminds us why we still need it so desperately. Without it, all true innovators might be resigned to the fate of MITS/Altair and Atari.
http://blog.actonline.org/2008/10/yeah-for-patent.html
I'm not sure TiVo is as special as people think it is. One of the patents at issue here is the concept of watching something that's started recording, which is blatantly obvious and certainly shouldn't deserve a patent.
As to the wider concept of DVRs, TiVo took an old concept at precisely the time it became commercially viable to make mass consumer versions (the release of the first TiVo came about shortly after 40Gb hard drives went sub-$200), and made a concerted effort to put a user friendly interface on it.
TiVo deserve credit for popularizing the DVR by packaging it as a consumer friendly box with tuners, but I'm not sure that means they deserve ownership of the DVR concept as many of their supporters believe. There is a place between "TiVo should own everything", which is the situation now, and "TiVo should be closed down" which many of TiVo's supporters think is the opposite. So far as I can tell, Dish's DVRs borrow heavily from the TiVo interface, but much of that interface is obvious, and the "Watch while recording" patent itself is obnoxious.