A four-year old lawsuit filed by Dynamic Advances related to Siri was finally settled by Apple for US$24.9 million. The lawsuit stated that Apple's intelligent assistant violated a technology owned and patented by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and the Dallas-based company is the licensee of the patent.
According to a report by Albany Business Review, Dynamic Advances filed the lawsuit in behalf of the New York institute in a U.S. District Court in the Northern District of New York and is scheduled to start next month. However, since both companies have agreed to do an out-of-court settlement, the case will be dropped.
The report also added that Apple will initially pay US$5 million to Dynamic Advances once the case is dropped. The remaining US$19.9 million will be settled after some more talks between the two companies. With this settlement, the tech giant can then use the patent for three years and no lawsuit will be filed within the time period.
The institute is expected to receive part of the 50 percent of the total amount, after all the legal fees have been deducted. However, it is also said that Rensselaer Polytechnic is not in total agreement with the royalty fee and "may have to be resolved in arbitration," as stated on a document filed by Marathon Patent Group, the parent company of Dynamic Advances.
9To5Mac added that the patent in question may involve Siri's artifical intelligence when answering its user's questions and not the speech-recognition engine, which was developed by Nuance Communications, the company behind Dragon Dictate. Furthermore, the patent US7177798 B2 is called "Natural language interface using constrained intermediate dictionary of results."
On its abstract, it says, "A method for processing a natural language input provided by a user includes: providing a natural language query input to the user; performing, based on the input, a search of one or more language-based databases; providing, through a user interface, a result of the search to the user; identifying, for the one or more language-based databases, a finite number of database objects; and determining a plurality of combinations of the finite number of database objects. The one or more language-based databases include at least one metadata database including at least one of a group of information types including case information, keywords, information models, and database values."
