TiVo Twofer - The Marketplace section of today's WSJ has two articles on our favorite DVR: this one about TiVo's abilities to monitor users television-watching behavior and this one expressing disdain for TiVo's patent-infringement lawsuit against DishTV.

The former article digs up some "privacy consultant" to find complaint with the fact that TiVo collects lots of information from its users but does not release that data without the user's permission:

Still, some privacy experts say TiVo users are forced to take the company's word that it's not violating its own policies. "What they're saying is, 'You have to trust us,' " says Richard Smith, a privacy and security consultant, who has examined TiVo's technology. " 'We're going to snoop on you, but we will disconnect all that information we have about you from your actual identity.' "

And the problem with that is? How odd for the Journal to be touting the views of another "it ain't broke, but let's regulate it anyway" expert.

The second article takes its theme from the "information wants to be free" camp, by casting doubt - without anything like serious legal analysis - on TiVo's claim to patents on part of the DVR concept (the part involving saving video files to disk). Maybe they have a point. It is possible that TiVo is just hitching a ride on the over-expansive patent-litigating bandwagon so popular these days. (Why NPR was just decrying the phenomenon on Friday, in relation to the battle shaping up between streaming video patent-holder Acacia and porn websites.) But before we tar our friends in Alviso with the same brush, shouldn't we at least do a little better job looking into their claims, rather than just assuming they are frivolous?