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Taiwan University Sues Apple Over Siri Patents
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters is reporting that Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University has filed a suit against Apple claiming patent infringement by the Siri voice-recognition software. At issue are two patents dating to 2007 and 2010. From the article: 'The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, on Friday, it said. "We filed that lawsuit in the Texas court because it processes faster and its rulings are usually in favor of patent owners and the compensations are usually higher," said Yama Chen, legal manager of National Cheng Kung, in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan.'"
It is nice when ugly corporations get hoisted by their own sack.
Keep in mind that this is a US company being sued in a US court by a company from Taiwan. Apple recently had the fact that their iPhone design was 'borrowed' from Sony suppressed in their Samsung lawsuit; I'm sure they're not very worried about this.
"We filed that lawsuit in the Texas court because it processes faster and its rulings are usually in favor of patent owners and the compensations are usually higher..."
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Apple recently had the fact that their iPhone design was 'borrowed' from Sony suppressed in their Samsung lawsuit
Nothing like half a story, eh? Or maybe you're genuinely not aware, but the accusation of 'borrowing' now seems well wide of the mark. Google "iPhone Purple prototype" if you haven't seen the designs that pre-date the Sony-inspired images.
Maybe Chinese patent trolls will eventually alert US patent supporters to how stupid the system is.
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Apple recently had the fact that their iPhone design was 'borrowed' from Sony suppressed in their Samsung lawsuit
Nothing like half a story, eh? Or maybe you're genuinely not aware, but the accusation of 'borrowing' now seems well wide of the mark. Google "iPhone Purple prototype" if you haven't seen the designs that pre-date the Sony-inspired images.
Well, it's a good damn thing Sony doesn't prototype their products prior to releasing them then isn't it!
Two sovereign states with the name "China" exist.
ROC = Republic of China = Democratic China = Taiwan
PRC = People's Republic of China = Communist China = Mainland China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Chinas. Prior to 1971 "China" was the ROC in the UN, it is now the PRC...
I really wish everyone would get over the idea that East Texas is still the best place to file patent suits. It definitely was for about a year in the mid-2000s, but since then it's returned back to within a few percentage points of the national average.
The percentage of patent cases where the plaintiff succeeded at trial was, over the period from 1995-2009, in line with the national average (66.7% trial success in East Texas vs. 66% nationwide), and by all indications it hasn't changed from that in the last few years (as a point of comparison, Florida Middle District Court had an 80% trial success rate for plaintiffs over that same period). Aside from the one-year blip where plaintiffs won more frequently and the district deservedly earned its reputation, its rates have been at levels that are in line with other district courts. Unfortunately, most people seem to have not caught on to that fact yet (even Wikipedia's sources regarding much of this stuff is several years out of date).
Because of that one year blip being so noteworthy, there is still a mistaken perception that the East Texas courts are plaintiff friendly, but that's all it is now: a perception. In fact, for NPEs (i.e. non-practicing entities, a.k.a. patent trolls), the Florida Middle District and the Delaware District courts had overall success rates (i.e. including summary judgments) that were about 11% and 7% higher, respectively, than East Texas over the period from 1995-2009.
That said, the East Texas courts do make for an ideal venue for trying patent cases, even if they're not as one-sided as people seem to think. The district has faster turnaround times than many other federal districts (which was part of the motivating factor in this particular case), the judges are well-versed in patent cases and have indicated an interest in handling them expeditiously, and there are local laws permitting lawyers from any bar association, not just the Texas bar, from trying their cases there, making it easier to use than some of the other districts.
The fact that the judges are knowledgeable is especially important, because many of the corporations being sued prefer to have their cases tried there, rather than getting them transferred to their home district where an ignorant judge can add a major level of uncertainty to the equation (in fact, in one case involving 112 defendants less than a year ago, the East Texas judge was able to dismiss 99 of the defendants immediately because they weren't infringing and didn't request transfers to other districts). As a result, more cases that start in the district tend to stay in the district than you might otherwise see, creating a larger volume of cases that reach a conclusion. So, not only does it handle more cases, but it also concludes more cases than most of the other district courts.
It's just a shame that people are still perpetuating the idea that it's plaintiff-friendly when it's not, since it sets up East Texas as a distraction and as a scapegoat to vent our frustrations over the patent system whenever a ruling we disagree with comes out of there. The fault isn't theirs any more than it is any other court's. It's the fault of the corporations playing this billion dollar game with each other.
(Note: much of this was pulled from a previous comment of mine from February)
So now we've even outsourced our patent trolls? When will it end.
that said, this could get interesting, and lets go super conspiracy theory.
Patent troll sues Apple, Apple "settles" which gives legitimacy to said patent troll.
Patent troll uses that legitimacy to get injunctions against all other smart phones that use voice.
Apple wins.
Damn it.
I am 31337 or something.
No point based on design patents ever stands. The concept itself is broken, even if it didn't have the worldwide chiilling effect that it does.
Adoption of ever-better human interfaces should be encouraged, not dissuaded. Treating them as proprietary is the biggest conceptual idiocy in the history of Man.
People suing Apple isn't exactly a *NEW* thing. It's actually been quite steady or so (one every week or so) the past decade or more.
Heck, Creative sued Apple about a decade ago over the use of categories to help find music (Artist/Album/Genre/etc) on the iPod way back when. (I believe Apple settled, in exchange for a pile of stuff Creative was to make to support the iPod or so). Ditto Sony and others.
It's actually unusual to have Apple NOT being sued by someone or other on a weekly basis.
No, they expect YOU to follow YOUR rules. Companies from China don't take US rules seriously when they're creating products for sale in China, since US laws don't apply in China. They follow US rules for products selling in the US, and expect the local companies to do the same. Just like they follow Chinese rules in China, and expect foreign companies to do the same.
This is Taiwan, not PRC China. Situation is very different there.
Normally universities do research and don't develop a thechnology to production quality. For this they either do spin-offs or licensing. And apple didn't license the patents.
I am more interested if someone here checked the patents in question have any merits?
Another question is should a (presumely public funded) university patent its inventions at all?
I don't think you have ever been to China or Taiwan. On paper, to the "outside" world Taiwan may appear to be governed by the Chinese government but in reality they are independent.
The arrangement with China is pretty much you ignore us and we'll ignore you.
They're not my rules, I don't live in the US.
Taiwan is de facto sovereign. The only non-sovereign part about Taiwan is that due to pressures by the PRC govt, most of the International community do not recognize Taiwan/ROC's sovereignty (over the island generally known as "Taiwan").
It's a over-complicated issue though, and really depends on who you're talking to, and whether you're trying to be factually correct or politically correct....
Don't quote me on this.
Taiwan's democracy doesn't make China look bad any more than any other democracy makes China look bad. Taiwan's location is strategic for China. It sits between Japan and the South China Sea (which China has made clear it wants to dominate). Taiwan sits on a strategic supply route for South Korea and Japan. China views Taiwan as part of a potential buffer between the Pacific Ocean and China.
The other problem China has with Taiwan is that the hatred between the Chiang (whose forces occupied Taiwan) and Mao was strong enough that neither could accept the existence of the other. Prior to Chiang's occupation of Taiwan Mao made a statement supporting independence from Japan for Taiwan. But once Chiang moved to Taiwan, Taiwan suddenly became important to Mao. After 60 years of propaganda about how important it is to take Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party looks bad to their ultra-nationalists by their failure to do so, and even moderating their tone on the issue is difficult.
US law requires that we sell Taiwan such defensive weapons as it needs, based purely on need and not on consultation with China. Neither US law nor treaty requires the US to defend Taiwan. Instead the US has to consider it a "grave" concern. It is deliberately ambiguous so that the US can dissuade both sides from launching hostilities with a certain expectation of how the US will respond.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Disclaimer: I'm not a patent lawyer, but I do know a thing or two about speech recognition. I've only read the summaries of the patents, but they don't seem to cover anything that Siri or any other sensible speech recogniser system does.
Patent 7,266,496 (from 2007) is about a complete speech recogniser on a chip. This couldn't be further from Siri, which sends the audio data to the cloud to be recognised. The four "modules" that the patent covers are bog-standard. Patent 7,707,032 (from 2010) describes a silly way of doing speech recognition (by comparing with individual training samples) and is unrelated to any modern commercial speech recogniser.
This is just some Taiwanese university hoping for two minutes of fame and a settlement. They seem to be getting their fame, but they're not going to see any money.
Sorry, but this is pretty silly. The US does still consist of semi-independent states. No, they're not as independent as they were under the Articles of Confederation, or as independent as they were pre-Civil War. They're not as independent as the nations that comprise the EU either, from what I can tell. However, they are a lot more independent than, say, the states that form modern Germany.
There's a lot of legal things that differ drastically between different US states. Gun laws, for instance, are very different; in Arizona you can have just about anything, and you can carry it around (concealed or not) in public all you want, while next door in California there's tons of restrictions on things like magazine size, and in Hawaii it's very hard to own one and nearly impossible to carry it outside your house. Marriage laws are also extremely different; some states will recognize gay marriage, others refuse to. Some states have "community property" laws, so that spouses have a claim to half of anything they gained during their marriage, whereas other states don't. Some states are "right to work" states where either employer or employee can terminate employment at any time, with no notice, for any cause at all (except discrimination against protected classes and some other exceptions), whereas in other states it's not so easy to fire an employee.
As I have come to believe it is actually THE SAME conceptual idiocy. Consider what "organised religion" is all about.
Before organised religion there were groups of people, who now and then came up with rules and stuff to make living easier. Then "organizers" came along that took that rules, made them more and more complex until nobody understood them any more and everybody needed "high priests" to explain them and "oracles" to divine the will of the gods, which they only gave if the people paid them tribute.
Until people thought "this is all crap, let's make new rules and laws apart from that religious nonsense.".
Not a *new* group of people hat taken those rules and made them more and more complex until nobody understood them any more and everybody needed "lawyers" to explain them and "consultants" to divine the likely outcome of court cases, which they only give if the people pay them fees.
And 99% of the normal people are screwed again.
How so? Apple's design for the iPhone circa half a decade ago came at a time when phones had slide-out keyboards and buttons. My Cliq has volume up/down, power, camera, and on the front at the bottom a menu/home/back set. Newer Android phones are all suddenly super thin, no physical keyboard, menu-home-back is pretty integral to the Andorid interface though. Some have eschewed camera, most use volume down to enter the bootloader and boot a recovery system.
Everyone's trying to eliminate physical buttons just like they eliminated the stylus after Samsung declared the stylus must die--eliminating the stylus crippled smartphones and PDAs (back in 1999, you could get a Compaq iPaq with Windows on it with Pocket Word and PocketPC 6, and the handwriting recognition could take my unreadable scribble and interpret it as text proper -- it seemed to be able to read topology, rather than just shape). I used the PDA as a pretty serious professional portable word processor and it was fantastic. Do you see AbiWord on Android with handwriting recognition and a stylus? Just as Samsung led the demise of the stylus, Apple is leading the demise of buttons... starting with physical keyboards.
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Taiwan has its own government, currency, army. They have 290K people in their armed forces (more than the UK or France). They develop their own weapons systems. How the heck do you think it isn't sovereign? Because the PRC says it isn't?
The normal defence for companies being sued for patent infringement is to find a breach of their own patent portfolio by the suer's products, then settle out of court.
It kindof assumes that the entity bringing the case makes commercial products themselves. Entities that don't are basically untouchable, which is why patent trolls avoid selling actual products.
Its going to be very hard for apple to find a quid-pro-quo breach by a university.
There were plenty of touch screen phones and PDAs without physical keyboards long before iPhone came out. Many Windows Mobile phones and PDAs were designed that way, as were Palm devices. Getting rid of the stylus and keyboards wasn't some grand insight of Steve Jobs, it was just driven by cheaper and bigger LCD screens and better touch screens. Palm software was increasingly finger driven long before the iPhone.