Reuters reports that a Beijing court has ruled against Apple’s attempt to throw out a claim that the company’s virtual personal assistant Siri infringes on a patent held by a Chinese company. The ruling allows the company to move forward with its case against Apple for infringing their intellectual property rights.
“Apple had taken Shanghai-based Zhizhen Internet Technology and China’s State Intellectual Property Office to court to seek a ruling that Zhizhen’s patent rights to a speech recognition technology were invalid.”
However, the Beijing First Intermediate Court ruled in Zhizhen’s favor on Tuesday.
Following the verdict, Apple told the People’s Daily that it intends to take the case to the Beijing Higher People’s Court.
“Unfortunately, we were not aware of Zhizhen’s patent before we introduced Siri (speech recognition technology) and we do not believe we are using this patent,” said a Beijing-based Apple spokeswoman in an emailed statement to Reuters.
“While a separate court considers this question, we remain open to reasonable discussions with Zhizhen,” the spokeswoman said.
Zhizhen declined to comment.
Zhizhen sued the U.S. firm in 2012 for intellectual property rights infringement, asserting that Apple’s Siri violated Zhizhen’s own voice system patents.
