Apple has agreed to pay $24.9M to settle a long-running lawsuit alleging that Siri violated a patent owned by a New York institute and exclusively licensed to a company in Dallas. The patent predates the launch of Siri by four years.
The Albany Business Review notes that Apple was sued not by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which holds the patent, but by Dallas-based Dynamic Advances, which licensed it. The company reportedly receives $5M now, and the balance after meeting unspecified conditions. In return, Apple gets a license to use the patented technology for three years.
The settlement means that the patent trial, due to take place in New York next month, will no longer proceed. However, that may not be the end of it …
Under the terms of the deal, Dynamic Advances would hand over 50% of the money to Rensselaer – but Rensselaer has reportedly not agreed to the terms, with one document stating that the issue ‘may have to be resolved in arbitration.’
It’s interesting that Apple has chosen to settle the case given that Siri’s speech-recognition engine was developed by Nuance Communications, the company behind Dragon Dictate, and not by Apple itself. The patent seems rather general, but it’s possible that it relates to the AI behind answering the queries, hence the decision to sue Apple.
Apple regularly adds to Siri’s capabilities, recent new features including baseball stats and history, and Live Tune-in on the Apple TV.
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I think the patent system is heavily flawed — patents should be for actual technology etc, not theory… if you come up with a plausible idea and you want to patent it there should be 3 phases – phase 1 be the idea, phase 2 be a working prototype, phase 3 be an actual product. — each phase 1 should have a time limit of a year to have a working prototype, phase 2 should be 2 years to take that prototype and make an actual product…otherwise, you end up with half bogus patents that could apply to so many things, and they just sit in drawers waiting for a possible product they could sue… it hinders tech and development.
plus, with this, sure the patent also applies to google now, and corona…and any other voice recognition software that responds from a database such as amazon echo…
No patent should ever be awarded for anything except a working demonstrable product.
I could patent theoretical anti-grave boots and sue the first guy that actually makes it.
That would punish someone who comes up with a great idea but does not have the resources to produce it – why would they shop it around to companies with the adequate resources when your scheme would allow those companies to just steal the idea by making their own working prototype first?
i think you have to give credit to those that come up with the idea, but you have to be showing that you are trying to develop the idea rather than keeping it in a drawer to make money off others later.
each phase, as a mentioned, should also clauses – so phase one means people can use that idea but you only get credited… phase two means people can request to use the patent, but if after 2 years the original patent holder has not developed to a final product then the patent can be passed on to the first company who has used the idea and can show they have developed it further (often other people who use patents add to them)… phase 3 is technically a patent product that is fully working – this is where a full patent is given.
I think Apple needs a “patent czar” or three as they never seem to be prepared for this.
I’m sure that Apple has a patent group – either in house or contracted. With all of the patents they file themselves, I assume their is a dedicated patent group within an internal legal department. It would seem likely that Apple is, and has been, well aware of this patent infringement. Obviously a business decision was made, for some strategic reason, to proceed with the infringement. It would also seem like, unless they have licensed it, other products like the Amazon echo would have the same problem (unless the patent is limited to wearables or something like that).
Why didn’t they go after Nuance before they sold the rights to Apple? This kind of stuff is ridiculous.
As the article stated, it likely isn’t the voice recognition that is the issue but using voice to perform some type of action (e.g. answer a question, turn on lights, etc.).
So Adam Cheyer who created Siri and sold it to Apple. So the question is: Where was Adam Cheyer patent for what he created and why didn’t Apple check Adam Cheyer patent before they bought it from him?
Adam Cheyer in 2008, as inventor, computer scientist, engineer, and entrepreneur, he co-created the world’s first intelligent personal assistant, Siri, with Dag Kittlaus and Tom Gruber. Siri, Inc. was a technology company borne out of SRI International, a nonprofit research unit, to create a highly clever and personable virtual assistant for smartphone consumers. By 2010, the company had been acquired by Apple Inc., and the Siri app was incorporated into Apple’s iPhone 4S handsets.
Why companies wait so long to file a suit I just don’t understand. New York institute should have filed a suit back in 2008 against Adam Cheyer to see if his patent violated their, not wait until 8 years later.
I guess the easy answer is not the legal win itself but the legal win that generates profit. The earlier you sue the more likely the less you earn from it. Or am I being cynical. This is a strange one siri has a well documented history and no where along the line do these characters figure. Yet now they are being banded around as its creator in some circles so where does that leave all those others normally associated with it. Seems like there must be real complexity to this beneath the surface.
Exactly. Obviously they can’t stop Apple from using Siri as it is now baked into iOS and Dynamic Advances waited until the timing was just right…
I guess I’m missing something. Siri violated a patent. What did the patent cover? What process or action, or code did it violate?