Hello again,
take a look if you'd like to read more in depth about this article: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/27/apple-ensnared-in-chinese-patent-fight-over-siri/.
Yes, once again, we'll be talking about Apple vs Someone-else.
Although this time, it's a Chinese company called Xiaoi that is suing them. Over Siri.
The foreigner: Xiaoi
Their product: automated chat robot for Customer Service/hotlines
The argument: "Siri infringes on OUR patents."
When they got their patent: 2006
When Siri appeared in Apple phones: 2011
As most of us know, Siri was a technology that Apple acquired, and Xiaoi's problem is the robot interaction part of Siri, not the speech recognition capabilities.
Not that much information is out yet, but I think it's funny how these things come to pop up many years after the fact.
In your opinion, is Xiaoi way out of line? Did Apple really infringe on their patent? Let me know below!
Either the technology was developed independently or the company that originally developed Siri may have infringed upon Xiaoi. At a high level, it doesn't seem like the automated chat robot has anything in common with Siri, which seems to go a step further in providing an answer to the prompt.
ReplyDeleteAs we learned in class, in order for a product to infringe on a patent, it needs to infringe on every single claim in the patent, which is why a broader patent with 2 claims is much stronger than one with 3 or more. In this case, I wonder if the specific patent in question has in fact been infringed on or if perhaps only one or two of its claims have been copied.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting. I concur with Noah here in that a infringement of patent relies on the fact that each claim of a patent is infringed. So Siri may be somewhat similar but in my opinion not an infringement.
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