Defendant
3 cases as defendant.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is a private, nonsectarian research university in Troy, New York, founded in 1824 and described by the Institute as the nation's oldest technological university. It is an independent nonprofit, not publicly traded and not a subsidiary. Per RPI's own recruitment materials for 2024–25, the Institute enrolled roughly 5,665 undergraduates and 1,064 graduate students, with an operating budget of about $440 million, roughly $120 million in annual research expenditures, and a $1.1 billion endowment. Forbes ranks it among national research universities.
RPI awards degrees through five schools — Engineering; Science; Architecture; Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences; and the Lally School of Management — plus interdisciplinary programs, with research concentrated in biotechnology, computation and information technology, experimental media, energy and the environment, and nanotechnology. It also operates a technology-transfer and licensing function; a 2013 complaint stated the USPTO had issued 296 patents to Rensselaer.
Litigation posture: RPI is an operating institution and a light, two-way litigant — three tracked plaintiff cases and three defendant cases, all arising from a single patent family. U.S. Patent No. 7,177,798 ("Natural Language Interface Using Constrained Intermediate Dictionary of Results"), invented by RPI professor Cheng Hsu and doctoral student Veera Boonjing and assigned to RPI, was asserted by RPI as patent owner together with its exclusive licensee, Dynamic Advances LLC (later CF Dynamic Advances LLC), a licensing vehicle acquired by Marathon Patent Group in 2014. Cases were filed in the Northern District of New York, RPI's home district, not in plaintiff-friendly venues such as the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable cases: RPI and Dynamic Advances sued Apple in 2013 over Siri, settling in 2016 for $24.9 million; Apple also filed an IPR at the PTAB. RPI and CF Dynamic Advances sued Amazon in 2018 over Alexa; the N.D.N.Y. granted summary judgment invalidating the '798 patent under 35 U.S.C. § 101, affirmed by the Federal Circuit on February 24, 2026. Amazon filed an IPR in May 2019.
Amazon.com, Inc. filed an IPR petition against Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute et al. concerning U.S. Patent 7,177,798. Institution was denied on November 14, 2019.
Apple Inc. filed an IPR petition against Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute concerning U.S. Patent 7,177,798. Institution was denied on June 12, 2014.
IPR petition concerning U.S. Patent 7,177,798. The petitioner is believed to be Apple Inc. but was not fully confirmed in the retrieved sources; the petition was not instituted on the merits.