On September 3, Xiaoi Robot (Shanghai Zhizhen Intelligent Network Technology Co., Ltd.) filed a behavioral preservation application (injunction) with the Shanghai Higher People’s Court, requiring Apple to immediately stop patent infringement involving Siri. , stop producing, selling, offering for sale, importing, and using iPhone products that infringe the ZL200410053749.9 invention patent. On September 6, the Shanghai Higher People's Court accepted Xiaoi's application for an injunction, and the case is currently under trial. This patent litigation has lasted for 8 years, and it has not yet come to a result. Let’s review this patent litigation.
Eight years of patent disputes
Patent litigation through Smart Bud Global Patent Database According to the query function search, in August 2004, Shanghai Yingsi Software Technology Co., Ltd. and Yuan Hui, as the same patent applicants, applied for a patent for "a chat robot system" and obtained the patent in July 2009. Authorization. In 2010, Apple acquired Siri. Inc for US$200 million. In November 2011, Shanghai Yingsi Software transferred the patent rights to Shanghai Zhizhen Intelligent Network Technology Co., Ltd. (Little i Robot). In December of the same year, Apple launched Siri (intelligent assistant), an intelligent personal assistant service, for the first time on its iPhone 4S mobile phone. Later, it was successively equipped with Siri (intelligent assistant) in iPhone 5, iPad 3, iPad 4, iPad mini, iTouch 4 and other products. ).
Figure 1: The application and transfer process of the patent for “a chat robot system”
Figure 2: Smart Bud Global Patent Database’s record of the above patent litigation
The patent description shows that this patent It relates to a chat robot system. The chat robot has a communication module, an artificial intelligence server, a query server, a game server, and a corresponding database. Users can have various conversations with chatbots through instant messaging platforms or SMS platforms. This chat robot has certain artificial intelligence and powerful information service functions, such as chat, information query, personal assistant, game interaction, supplement to instant messaging platform functions, etc.
Figure 3: Patent document attachment (part)
Zhizhen Intelligent Network He said that this patent is one of the basic patents for China's human-computer interactive intelligent robots and has completely independent intellectual property rights. Previously, Apple said that Siri did not include features included in its patent, which is related to games and instant messaging, and argued that an independent appraisal agency certified by the Supreme People's Court concluded that Apple did not infringe on Xiaoi Robot's technology. After Zhizhen Smart Network filed an application for an injunction, Apple has yet to respond.
Apple has already experienced hundreds of battles in patent litigation
After decades of experience at Apple In its development history, the above-mentioned patent litigation with Xiaoi Robot is only a small part of its experience. According to Smart Bud data, Apple and its affiliated companies are involved in 149 patent lawsuits with public results in 126 countries/regions around the world. These lawsuits lasted about 16 months on average. Among them, the lawsuits as defendants There are more than 80. An analysis of the above lawsuits shows that Apple's patent litigation in recent years*** involves 186 patents, mainly concentrated in the fields of interactive, displays, power supply voltage, semiconductors, digital images, computer systems and other fields.
Figure 4: Technical fields involved in Apple patent litigation
Due to long-term litigation cases It may involve a lot of preparation work, and the unpredictable outcome of litigation, as well as outsourced legal advice, may result in high litigation costs. Therefore, patents involved in long-term litigation cases represent one of the company's most valuable technologies to a certain extent, and the company is willing to invest more time and money to fight for ownership of the patent rights.
From this perspective, Apple’s longest litigation was the “patent case of the century” that it filed as the plaintiff in April 2011. The defendant in the case was Samsung. Electronics, the case was finally concluded in June 2018, and the total litigation time was more than 86 months (about 7 years). The lawsuit involves 14 products such as Samsung Captivate and 27 patents including Apple's "Graphical user interface for a display screen or portion thereof" (publication number: USD617334S1). Finally, Apple and Samsung announced a settlement in their patent litigation.
Figure 5: Apple patent litigation length ranking
Patent litigation is usually related to market competition. Inseparable. In many patent litigations, on the basis of maintaining fairness and justice, both the plaintiff and the defendant are more pursuing to use litigation to achieve their market competition goals, either to gain a larger market share, to prevent competitors from going public, or to Forced to fight back in order to win another lawsuit.