Apple Can't Shake Patent Suit Over Siri
By Vin Gurrieri
Law360, New York (January 7, 2016, 8:46 PM ET) -- A New York magistrate judge has nixed Apple’s bid for a ruling that its Siri program didn’t infringe a patent covering speech recognition technology used to process commands, a ruling that moves a Texas-based licensee's infringement case one step closer to trial.
Although the reasoning behind Magistrate Judge David E. Peebles’s ruling was sealed, a docket entry shows the judge rejected Apple’s bid to win summary judgment that it didn’t infringe Dynamic Advances LLC's U.S. Patent 7,177,798.
Additionally, the judge issued a host of other rulings as part of the sealed order: Dynamic lost a request for judgment that Apple infringed certain asserted claims of the ‘798 patent, and both sides lost various requests to exclude certain expert reports and witnesses.
Marathon Patent Group Inc., a patent licensing company that owns co-plaintiff Dynamic Advances, issued a statement Thursday calling the court's order on the parties' dispositive motions “a major milestone in the case.”
“As a result of the court's order denying Apple's motion for summary judgment of non-infringement and denying Apple's motion to exclude the damages opinions of Dynamic Advances' expert witness, the company is preparing for the opportunity later this year to have a jury hear the case,” Marathon’s statement said.
The parties have until Jan. 15 to confer and notify the court as to which portions of Judge Peebles’ order should be redacted from a version that will be made publicly available.
Dynamic along with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute initially filed the suit in 2012, claiming Apple’s Siri personal assistant application for iPhone, iPad and iPod infringed U.S. Patent No. 7,177,798, which covers speech recognition technology used to process commands.
The ‘798 patent was issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in February 2007 and assigned to the Rensselaer, which later granted Dynamic an exclusive license, according to court documents.
Dynamic Advances claims Apple shipped, distributed, sold and advertised products that incorporated patented technology covering the process of speaking commands into a device and receiving corresponding information.
“Apple’s Siri personal assistant, available for select iPhones, iPads, and iPods, includes technology claimed in the [Dynamic] patent,” the complaint said. “Apple is thus liable for infringement.”
Siri — introduced in October 2011 in Apple's iPhone 4S — is a voice-to-text intelligent personal assistant program that allows iPad and iPhone users to set reminders, send texts, check the weather and perform other tasks using voice commands.
In seeking a ruling of noninfringement, Apple had argued in a partially redacted April motion that the ‘798 patent is describes a specific way to use natural language to interface with a so-called enterprise database, but that Siri is not an interface to an enterprise database.
“Siri’s vocabulary spans millions and millions of words, something the ’798 patent seeks to avoid and cannot handle,” Apple had argued in its motion. “Because Siri is not an interface to any particular database, Siri’s natural language processing does not use a metadata database with information about the database to be queried as all the claims of the ’798 patent require.”
Counsel for Apple was not immediately available for comment late Thursday.
Dynamic is represented by James R. Muldoon and Steven P. Nonkes of Harris Beach PLLC. Rensselaer is represented by Nicholas Mesiti of Heslin Rothenberg Farley & Mesiti. Both parties are jointly represented by Paul J. Skiermont, Donald E. Tiller, Alexander E. Gasser and Shellie Stephens of Skiermont Derby LLP.
Apple is represented by Carolyn Chang, J. David Hadden, Hector Ribera, Jeffrey A. Ware and William A. Moseley, Jr., of Fenwick & West LLP, as well as Mitchell J. Katz of Menter Rudin & Trivelpiece PC.
The case is Dynamic Advances LLC v. Apple Inc., case number 1:12-cv-01579, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York.
--Additional reporting by Aaron Vehling. Editing by Patricia K. Cole.
