Beijing court rules in favor of U.S. firm over voice-recognition service
Shanghai Zhizhen Network Technology Co said on Wednesday that it is preparing to file an appeal with China's Supreme People's Court over a disputed patent case between the Chinese voice technology company and U.S. phone maker Apple Inc.
During a press conference held in Beijing Wednesday, executives of Zhizhen, developer of voice-recognition service Xiao i Robot, and the firm's attorney all expressed their dissatisfaction with the Beijing High People's Court's decision in favor of Apple for a voice-recognition patent.
The judges in the panel during the Beijing court trial lacked professional knowledge regarding computer science, Yuan Yang, Zhizhen's attorney, said at the conference.
Zhizhen thinks the court did not offer any solid reasons for its ruling that Zhizhen had insufficiently publicly disclosured the disputed patent.
The patent infringement dispute between Zhizhen and Apple goes back to 2012, when the Chinese company filed a complaint against Apple's Siri voice-recognition technology for infringing its intellectual property rights on a patent called "a type of instant messaging chat robot system" and the U.S. company asked China's top patent watchdog to invalidate the patent.
The Beijing High People's Court decision came in late April in support of Apple, after the Patent Review Committee under the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court, in September 2013 and July 2014 respectively, rejected Apple's complaint that Zhizhen infringed on the copyright for Siri.
"It is not a surprise that the patents granted by the SIPO were ruled invalid by courts in China," Zhao Zhanling, legal counsel for the Internet Society of China, told the Global Times Wednesday.
Officials at SIPO as well as court judges should increase their knowledge, especially when it comes to the fast-developing Internet technology industry, said Zhao.
Both Zhao and Zhizhen's lawyer said it is hard to predict the final result of the disputes between the two companies.
"Even if we lose the case against Apple, we believe we can still maintain a leading position in China's artificial intelligence market," as the disputed patent is just one in the company's rich patent portfolio, Zhizhen's CEO Yuan Hui told the Global Times Wednesday.
Having gathered more than 50 intellectual rights on patents and trademarks in the intelligent robot field since the company was founded in 2001, Zhizhen claimed its Xiao i Robot technology serves more than 200 million end users in China on the Web, iOS and Android operating systems in partnership with State-owned telecom carriers and a number of banks.
According to Zhizhen's press release issued on Wednesday, it applied for the intellectual rights to the disputed voice-recognition patent in 2004 and was granted it in 2009.
Siri was applied to Apple's iPhone 4S in 2011, after being developed by a start-up also called Siri in 2007. The start-up was acquired by Apple in 2010, according to the press release.
"Patent war is always a way of taking on rivals in the Internet technology market," Zhang Yi, CEO of Guangzhou-based iiMedia Research, told the Global Times Wednesday.
If Zhizhen wins the case, Xiao i Robot can block the usage of Siri in China, but if it fails, Zhizhen will also benefit from the case due to the publicity, Zhang noted.
China's artificial intelligence sector is a crucial field for tech firms in China, with a report by Huatai Securities in February valuing it at 1 trillion yuan ($161.3 billion) without defining a time period.
U.S. software giant Microsoft has bet on artificial intelligence in China by launching chatbot Xiaoice (also known as Xiaobing), with artificially intelligent virtual assistant Cortana in August 2014.
At the conference, Zhizhen CEO Yuan Hui refused to comment on whether they will filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft in the future, saying the firm will focus on disputes with Apple.
