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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.
"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)
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.
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?
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.
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.