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25 January 2019Patents

Partial win for Google, Amazon, Microsoft in voice control dispute

A US district court has invalidated three patents covering technology for voice-controlled digital assistants, in a partial win for Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

On January 18, the US District Court for the District of Delaware ruled that three patents owned by a Canadian IP licensing company, IPA Technologies, “lacked an inventive concept” and that the claims of those patents are ineligible.

But the judge dismissed claims that three other patents are invalid.

It is the latest in a patent infringement dispute between IPA and the three companies over six of IPA’s patents. IPA, a subsidiary of WiLAN, acquired the patents in 2016 from a non-profit set up by Stanford University.

The patents are split into two groups. The first, known as the “Halverson patents”, includes three patents (US numbers 6,742,021; 6,523,061; and 6,757,718) that are “generally directed to navigating an electronic data source by means of spoken language”.

The second group, the “Cheyer patents”, includes three patents (US numbers 6,851,115; 7,069,560; and 7,036,128) that are generally directed to a software architecture for “supporting cooperative task completion by flexible and autonomous electronic agents”.

In December 2016, IPA filed a lawsuit against Amazon which said the company’s virtual assistant, Alexa, infringed the Halverson patents. Amazon denied infringement and moved to dismiss the claims.

In March 2018, a US district judge, Richard Andrews, granted Amazon’s motion to dismiss.

He said the Halverson patents are “drafted so broadly” that they would cover “any method that can achieve navigating electronic databases by spoken language input”.
He added that they “recite the most basic steps” that an inventor would take in creating a product.

In April 2018, IPA filed an amended complaint reasserting the Halverson patents and accusing Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana of infringing the Halverson and Cheyer patents.

In the latest ruling at the Delaware district court, Andrews relied on 2014 legislation by the US Supreme Court from the case Alice Corp v CLS Bank Int’l.

Following the guidance of the Supreme Court, Andrews said he must determine whether the claims of the Halverson patents recite an “abstract idea”.

In order to be patent eligible, the abstract idea must include additional features to ensure the claims are more “than a drafting effort designed to monopolise the abstract idea”.

IPA argued that its ‘021 patent included additional features and addresses “improvements to handling errors and ambiguities that arise from a spoken request for electronically stored database information”.

But, Andrews dismissed its argument as “boilerplate” and said the licensing company did “nothing more than recite language” of the claims in its ‘021 patent that he had already considered and dismissed in March 2018.

He concluded that all three of the Halverson patents lack an inventive concept and that their claims are ineligible.

However, it was only a partial win for Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Regarding the Cheyer patents, Andrews determined that they “lay out specific structures” to improve current technology.

Therefore, the court denied a joint motion by Google, Amazon and Microsoft to dismiss the Cheyer patents.

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