Apple stings SIPO with Siri legal action
Tech company Apple has reportedly taken legal action against China’s patent office and a local company following a dispute over the Siri technology.
Xinhua news agency reported on February 24 that Apple has sued the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and Zhizhen Network Technology, though it is unclear on what grounds.
Both Apple and Zhizhen have developed voice recognition technology, with the US company’s software called Siri and the Chinese company’s Xiao i Robot.
Siri was developed in 2007, three years after technology used in Xiao i Robot was patented in China. Apple launched Siri as part of the iPhone 4S product in 2011.
Apple has previously asked SIPO to invalidate a Zhizhen patent covering voice recognition, but the office rejected that plea. That rejection has prompted the latest legal action, Xinhua reported.
The Beijing Number one Intermediate People's Court will hear the case against SIPO and Zhizhen today, February 26, the agency said.
The case follows a patent dispute between Apple and Shanghai-based Zhizhen. The Chinese company itself sued Apple last year, claiming that Siri infringes its Xiao i Robot software. A ruling has not been announced.
After Zhizhen sued Apple last year, a lawyer representing the Chinese company told news agency AFP: “Our main goal at the current stage is to let the court validate our claim regarding the infringement. We are not ruling out the possibility of mediation or compensation, but they are to be considered in the future.”
The patent in that case is believed to be the one that Apple tried to invalidate at SIPO.
Commenting on the latest development, Gwilym Roberts, partner at Kilburn & Strode LLP, said that while little information is available, “it sounds like Apple is unhappy that it was not allowed to try to invalidate a patent that it was alleged to infringe”.
“If that’s genuinely the case, then Apple is right to be unhappy – patent systems should provide some way of defending yourself in an infringement case,” he said.
“Whether SIPO has immunity against a suit is another issue; this varies between countries. There have certainly been cases of the US Patent and Trademark Office being sued by disgruntled users, the most famous being when GlaxoSmithKline managed to get the agency to change its proposed continuation rules, which were causing chaos,” Roberts added.
“There is an implicit suggestion of protectionism in Apple’s actions at SIPO but the company may not run the moral high ground line too strongly – many thought that Apple benefited from the US International Trade Commission (ITC) stance against Samsung over US import bans last year,” he said.
In August last year, the US government overturned an import ban on Apple products that the ITC deemed to infringe a Samsung patent, but upheld a blocking order against Samsung that Apple had secured.
