“Apple is being sued for allegedly infringing on a patent filed in 2001 by two professors from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the oldest technological university in the US,” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple.
“A company by the name of Dynamic Advances, who is now the exclusive licensee of this patent, is the one suing Apple,” Purcher reports. “According to the company, Apple’s Siri personal assistant software is clearly infringing upon their patent.”
Purcher reports, “Is this case initiated by Dynamic Advances LLC just another greedy Patent troll grab-for-cash, or is it about Dynamic Advances being an IP Defender for the two professors? You be the judge.”
Much more in the full report here.
See…yet another reason for Apple to charge obscene amounts of money for their toys and hobbys…lawsuits.
I use the word “obscene” in the most positive and beautiful way. Apple’s prices cannot be high enough for me. The higher the price, the fewer poor people that can lay their hands on them. There has to be a way to profile these poor people to prevent them from coming into my Apple store. A student should not be allowed into an Apple store without a wealthy parent. Your parents aren’t wealthy – no getting in.
Better yet, Mr. Perfect RIch Guy, why not buy Apple®! Then NOBODY else could EVER buy an Apple® product but you! Now THAT’S a high priced product line! (I hope you’ll share!)
Ummm, isn’t that what lawyer wear??
All patent litigation is about cash, in one manner or another.
Look Apple had these ideas and demonstrated them in the 80’s and 90’s. Not only did they have the ideas, they bought companies an licensed from others the technology to perform all of these actions.
How is it, that some polytechnical institute, which is not the same calibre as say Berkley, Stanford, Harvord, etc. get off to claim a patent against Apple, which has done due diligence to make sure they are within their legal rights?
This is ridiculous.
No more ridiculous than Apple claiming they invented ‘multi-touch’ and pinch to zoom when those technologies were demonstrated in the 1980s but I feel your frustration none the less.
Sadly apple and everyone else is stuck with the patent system we have.
Hate the game not the player(s).
Have you even looked into Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute? That “some polytechnical institute” you’re referring to is the oldest tech school on the Western hemisphere and is at the forefront of technological innovation right along with places like MIT and CalTech.
Greed. pure greed. Lying, cheating, you name it, its currently totally fair game in this country cause GREED is GOOD…
PS.. I have some $50 a bottle snake oil to sell you. Or if you want for $10,000 you can get a share of the company. LOL
Did Apple not purchase a company that developed the technology behind Siri?? I though I had seen an article on that somewhere.
Ask Siri.
Educated idiots strike again, burn their ass Apple. danilko1 is right, this is ridiculous.
“You’ll – uhh – speak to it. And then it will – umm – give some results.”
See also our other patent title “Metal box with wire bits inside”.
I question the validity of any claim taking a year to initiate on something as well-known as Siri. Sounds frivolous.
mr professor just want to sleep with Siri, I guess.
There should be a law that forbids a patent if the “idea” doesn’t make it into a final product even as a prototype.
Money is the root of all evil. How can we trust rich people? They’re worse than poor people!
Answer: Trust No One.
These professors need a three hour tour. A THREE HOUR TOUR!
From Wiki:
“Siri is a spin-out from the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center, and is an offshoot of the DARPA-funded CALO project.[31][32]
Siri’s primary technical areas focus on a Conversational Interface, Personal Context Awareness, and Service Delegation.[33]
Siri’s speech recognition engine is thought to be provided by Nuance Communications, a speech technology company, although this has not been officially acknowledged by either Apple or Nuance.[34]”
So, did these guys have insight into what DARPA was doing, and ‘copied’ it?
These guys AI credibility goes way back to the early text recognition days, coding in LISP heuristic algorithms to differentiate between letter shapes. You could say they spent years contemplating their “A”-ness!
Ba-dum-dum! Crash!
I’m going to patent an amazing invention I dream of last night:
A computer-implemented method for processing natural human waste comprising: receiving natural human waste input such as solids or fluids; providing from said natural human waste input a plurality of materials in the manner of particles; identifying a finite number of permutations of the plurality of materials and transforming said materials into at least one of the permutations of finite number of objects as a result.
And I’ll wait for some innovative company to implement it in real life to sue him/her.
Atari Pilot used the same type of natural language input and programming and that was way back in 82 or thereabouts.
Take a look at this timeline:
2001 the professors file their patent
2007 Siri, Inc. is formed.
2010 Apple purchases Siri.
2011 the original Siri app ceases to function
2012 suddenly realize their patent is being infringed upon & sue Apple.
Now you tell me. Gold digging or patent defending ?
Apple never claimed to invent multi-touch (maybe the term “multi-touch”). They purchased the tech and then implemented it in a brilliant manner. Apple has been a good citizen in the vast majority of its work by paying for what they use. Yes, you could point to a handful of missteps, but comparing them to the rest of the industry?: thats like comparing a 7-year old shoplifter of a package of bubble-gum to Al Capone.
And this comes out now?
They clearly see that it infringes after such a long time? And I wonder how they can know Apple infringes. Do they have access to the Siri code or is this patent just another of them obvious ones…
Apple should just buy the patent from them.
Not that I’m an Apple fan-boy – but almost all software patents are ridiculous. (I have several from different companies, and they are no exception.) Why? Almost all software is “obvious to someone skilled in the art” – given a particular problem (a current or even a future one) to solve, there is almost no barrier to entry for anyone to find a solution, and a similar solution to even the hardest problem will can be found by anyone a few standard-deviations from the norm on the bell curve of skill and drive – when means thousands of similar solutions. As was said, it’s all about a self-sustaining cash industry.