Apple sued over Siri in patent case

A Shanghai-based company sued Apple Inc Tuesday in Shanghai No.1 Intermediate People's Court on charges that the US-based tech giant's Siri software copied technology that it had patented for its own voice-activated assistant software.

Shanghai Zhizhen Network Technology Co demanded that Apple and its Shanghai-based subsidiary, Apple Computer Trading (Shanghai) Co Ltd, cease manufacturing and selling products with Siri in China, including its iPhone and iPad devices.

Zhizhen Network Technology began developing its voice recognition system, dubbed Xiao i Robot, in 2003. It filed a patent for the system in 2004, which was approved in 2006.

The system allows users to acquire online information such as the weather, maps and airline flights with their voices. It has been integrated into online chat clients such as Microsoft's MSN, the plaintiff's lawyer said in court. The company has also started working with China Mobile to integrate the system into the telecom carrier's services.

Siri, also a voice-activated personal assistant, was originally a stand-alone iOS application. After purchasing Siri's developer, Apple integrated the software into its mobile operating system and released it in October 2011 with its iPhone 4S. It came to the Chinese market early the following year.

At Tuesday's hearing, the arguments centered on a judicial expert report submitted by the plaintiff, in which three computer experts from a legal institution in Pudong New Area concluded that Apple had infringed on the plaintiff's patent.

Apple's lawyers not only questioned the qualifications of the legal institution and the three experts, but also portrayed their method as unscientific. "The experts adopted black-box testing, which examines the functionality of an application without probing its internal workings," Apple's attorney said in the court. "When two applications have the same results, they assume they use the same technology."

Apple argued that the testing was unscientific because one cannot assume that Siri and Xiao i Robot used the same technology just because they had the same functionality.

"One can achieve the same results through various means," Apple's lawyer said. "Apple has its own technology for Siri, which is totally different from the plaintiff's. So, there hasn't been any patent infringement on our side."

The plaintiff's attorney defended the qualifications of the experts and the legal institution, pointing out that they had all been recognized by the government. As for the black-box testing, the lawyer pointed out that the method has been widely adopted.

The court did not make a ruling Tuesday. It said it will look into the details of the case in the near future.