Taiwan University Sues Apple Over Siri Patents 138
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.'"
Re:At least they are honest about it. (Score:0, Informative)
"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..."
Does that hold true when the patent owner is not American?
That section of Texas tends to be a little xenophobic.
Re:taiwan != china (Score:5, Informative)
ROC = Republic of China = Democratic China = Taiwan
PRC = People's Republic of China = Communist China = Mainland China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Chinas [wikipedia.org]. Prior to 1971 "China" was the ROC in the UN, it is now the PRC...
This trope is getting old (Score:5, Informative)
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 [pwc.com] (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seem to have not caught on to that fact yet (even Wikipedia's sources regarding much of this stuff is several years out of date).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 [slashdot.org] from February)
Re:Goose, Meet Gander (Score:5, Informative)
This is Taiwan, not PRC China. Situation is very different there.
Re:taiwan != china (Score:2, Informative)
The arrangement with China is pretty much you ignore us and we'll ignore you.
Re:taiwan != china (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Easy win for Apple (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Goose, Meet Gander (Score:3, Informative)
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.