“Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy believes its legal fight with Apple over Siri, the innovative personal assistant and voice-recognition system first used in the iPhone 4S, is potentially worth $120 million,” Larry Rulison reports for The Albany Times Union.
“RPI claims that the technology behind Siri was developed and patented more than a decade ago by one of its professors,” Rulison reports. “The school has sued Apple in U.S. District Court in Albany seeking undisclosed financial damages. RPI is working in conjunction with an Alexandria, Va., patent litigation company called Marathon Patent Group that also licensed the technology from RPI.”
“RPI says it doesn’t know how Apple values the Siri technology exactly, but a good place to start is the Samsung jury award back in the spring of this year,” Rulison reports. “‘In that lawsuit, Apple accused Samsung of infringing several Apple patents, including two patents that cover Siri,’ the filing says. ‘Apple sought and obtained a preliminary injunction and a $120 million jury verdict against Samsung based primarily on Siri’s importance to Apple in its global competition against Samsung’s Android-operated smart phones.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: No Siri patents were part of the second U.S. Apple v. Samsung trial that resulted in a $119.6 million jury verdict against Samsung. The five Apple patents that were involved in that trial are listed here.
Related article:
After seeking $2 billion, jury awards Apple just $120 million over Samsung’s infringement of two patents – May 2, 2014
Apple’s Siri allegedly infringes on patent from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors – October 24, 2012
If it was developed and patented more than a decade ago you have no financial damages to speak of as you have done nothing with it for 10 f’ing years. This is one part of the patent system I hate
No. That is the trademark system (same U.S. agency, the USPTO, but the rules are different). You can legally wait until a day before the patent expires to file a lawsuit for the past 15+ years of infringement.
They are being misleading on purpose.
Why didn’t the institute sue DARPA or Siri creators before Apple? Why was Apple awarded patents for Siri in the first place? What about the Apple Navigator? How can an institute patent a technology that does not exist yet? Apple had envisioned Siri, more than 20 million years ago. What, that was a misleading typo, I meant to say more than 20 years ago. They purchased Siri and licensed voice recognition from Nuance or Nuisance however you like to call them.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is a patent bully, in my honest opinion.
AAPL has deeper pockets for the trolls, I imagine
“They are being misleading on purpose.”
Yes, they are.
“Why didn’t the institute sue DARPA or Siri creators before Apple?”
Suing DARPA (or any other DoD agency) is *extremely* difficult. And, most DoD agencies have an unrestricted right to use most patents when they can justify it under “national defense”.
Further, the prior organization developing the Siri-like implementation didn’t have deep pockets like Apple.
“Why was Apple awarded patents for Siri in the first place?”
Apple didn’t patent Siri as a whole. Apple patented specific implementations of certain aspects of Siri. Many, many patents are based upon patents by other people with the new patent just being a variation on a specific, unique aspect of a new implementation. It happens all the time.
“What about the Apple Navigator?”
What about it? Was loosely described in Sculley’s book in 1987. The Knowledge Navigator presented by Sculley in August of 1993 at the same time as the introduction of the Newton was a concept piece. There was never enough detail given that could be patented. No specific implementations that could be produced were presented. It’s similar to the Fandroids pointing to the Star Trek series and saying that is “Prior Art”. You can’t use a generic concept with no specific implementation in a prior art defense.
“How can an institute patent a technology that does not exist yet?”
Isn’t that *exactly* what patents are all about? You come up with a specific implementation for an idea that does not exist yet. Then, unless you’re a patent troll, you go forth and try to get it built and sold.
“Apple had envisioned Siri, more than 20 million years ago. What, that was a misleading typo, I meant to say more than 20 years ago.”
As I said above, envisioning something, just coming up with the idea, is not useful as prior art. You need an implementation to be spelled out. You need to have that implementation documented (if it is kept as a “Trade Secret”), or patented, or put into the public domain.
“They purchased Siri and licensed voice recognition from Nuance or Nuisance however you like to call them.”
Purchasing a company that has infringing software/hardware just makes you, the purchaser, the infringer. You can’t point to the company you bought and say, “They were infringing, we’re not.”
Actually, Apple’s voice input to computer systems goes back to Casper. That was the internal code name for PlainTalk when they were first developing it. Apple was working on Casper as far back as about 1990. If Apple wants to attack this whole foolishness on a prior art basis. If I recall correctly, Casper was demoed on a Power Mac 840AV during that August 1993 roll out, now more than 21 years ago.
I didn’t have all the moving parts. But I am on to this. Apple is innocent.
This patent seems to have NOTHING to do with SIRI. Both patents in suit, and the one in the trial in Califirornia, had to do with predictive typing. . . The Rensselaer patent includes a lot of code, Apple’s does not. The approaches seem to be far different. The ideas and technology of Predictive Typing predates the Rensselaer patent by quite a bit. . . It is the Apple embodiment that Apple patented, not the idea.
I understood that SIRI was developed as part of a defence project, SAAB Aerospace being one of the developers.
I guess it’s quite possible that this professor was involved at some point in the process, but usually that gives the individual no rights to any financial gain from the later sale of products they were involved with.
I could be wrong, though.
I studied at Rensellaer Polytechnic many (many) years ago, but left for other schools after two years. Back then the unofficial student mantra was “Tute Sucks” – Tute being short for Institute. The education itself was fine, but the school was about 90% guys, and it was/is sited next to an old upstate industrial town (Troy). Nothing much to do, brutal winters.
RPI doesn’t have the endowment of stronger, better schools like MIT, so this seems like a simple money grab, Apple being the “deep pockets”. I hope Tute loses.
Sounds to me like you didn’t learn much at RPI. Like most small private ivy-league schools, they aren’t there to provide you with semi-professional sports and a vibrant metropolitan bar scene so you and your frat boy friends can get wasted every weekend. RPI is the oldest engineering school in the USA, and they are leaders in many technological fields. Whine about upstate NY weather if you must, but if you want a solid engineering education, then RPI belongs on the short list of smart people.
MIT is certainly no slouch either, but don’t credit MIT as a better institution just because it’s within spitting distance of Harvard, which laughs at the MIT endowment and the many nerds who go there like any other technical school.
If RPI is correct, as it appears it is, then I hope justice is done. Apple can afford to pay for its mistakes.
“Like most small private ivy-league schools, they aren’t there to provide you with semi-professional sports and a vibrant metropolitan bar scene so you and your frat boy friends can get wasted every weekend”
When the heck was RPI invited to join the Ivy League? Did anyone inform Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Pennsylvania and Yale that they now have this school to share the stage with?
Raymond, perhaps since you know so much about RPI you could have the common courtesy of spelling “Rensselaer” correctly.
The real question is why didn’t they figure out how to get this into Judge Koh’s courtroom if they want to win?
RPI can claim anything they want and go to trial. That is the law as long as a judge says there is cause to let to litigation go forward.
Deciphering patent claims and sub-claims is ponderous obscure work, open to interpretation and I don’t pretend to know who will win, but one thing is absolutely for certain:
There was prior art to RPI’s work, and RPI’s patents likely built upon & could even infringe those earlier patents. It happens all the time and Apple will scour those earlier patents AND all journal article and company literature to try to show there was prior art to the RPI work to invalidate the patents.
If you were holding a valuable set of patents, you too would fight using all the law allows. The verdict will be interesting.
Well than Microsoft should also be sued as they use the same voice and controls. But I also think since this other company has chose to do nothing with there technology they should get the least amount possible.
They essentially have lost no money and there is no damages because as it stands now they would still have no product to lose any money on.