Troy

Apple has agreed to pay nearly $25 million to settle a claim that the technology behind the popular Siri app on the iPhone was invented at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the late 1990s.

The $24.9 million settlement was reached just weeks before the case was set to go to trial in federal court in Syracuse.

An RPI spokeswoman declined comment. Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

RPI had claimed in a 2012 lawsuit filed against Apple in U.S. District Court in Albany that one of its engineering professors, Cheng Hsu, and his doctoral student, Veera Boonjing, invented a "natural language interface" system that could answer questions posed by human speech using sophisticated database searches.

Hsu and Boonjing filed for a U.S. patent for the invention back in 2000. RPI, which owns intellectual property developed by its researchers, later sold an exclusive license for the patent to a Dallas firm called Dynamic Advances, which is now owned by Marathon Patent Group, a publicly traded firm that makes money off patent royalties and litigation.

On Tuesday, Marathon Patent Group made a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it had reached a settlement with Apple in the case, and that RPI would share in the settlement amount, along with lawyers in the case. Apple will get a license for the RPI patent, although it was unclear if the cost was part of the settlement amount. A notice of settlement was also filed in federal court Tuesday.

"We have no comment at this time," Jason Assad, a spokesman for Marathon Patent Group told the Times Union on Tuesday.

It is unclear how much RPI would get exactly in the case. The SEC filing says that "50 percent of the gross proceeds" will go to RPI, Dynamic Advances' lawyers and the "predecessor exclusive licensee of the patents in suit."

It appears also that Marathon and RPI have yet to agree on certain terms of how they will allocate money in the settlement with Apple.

"Dynamic Advances believes RPI has unreasonably withheld its consent to the reasonable royalty rate set forth in the settlement agreement between Dynamic Advances and Apple, and that issue may have to be resolved in arbitration," the SEC filing by Marathon states.

RPI has claimed in the past that the lawsuit could be worth $120 million or more if it were to win, although that number was based on the outcome of Apple's parent infringement lawsuit against rival Samsung.

The actual Siri app was a spinoff of a Department of Defense artificial intelligence project at SRI International, the research institute started by Stanford University. Apple bought it reportedly for about $200 million in 2010.

In an interview with the Times Union in 2012, Hsu said that he and Boonjing worked for years on their invention as part of the larger project to create artificial intelligence.

However, at the time, there wasn't a definitive commercial application since devices like the iPhone, which launched in 2007, had yet to be developed.

"It was ahead of its time at that point," Hsu told the Times Union. "Who would have thought that that kind of market would be created?"

lrulison@timesunion.com • 518-454-5504 • @larryrulison