Speak For Yourself, a $300 app that Apple removed from the App Store for allegedly infringing on another company’s patents, will soon be reinstated. According to a blog post by one of the parents involved the lawsuit, the two companies who moved to have SFY taken down, Prentke Romich Company and Semantic Compaction Systems, have settled with the app makers behind SFY after coming to a licensing agreement. Meanwhile, children will soon be able to work with an iPad again in order to improve their speaking skills.
We wrote a feature in June of this year about the saga over the SFY app—Apple pulled the app after the two companies filed a lawsuit against the app developers for patent infringement. At the time, SFY said its business had been affected in the wait for an official court ruling and by the “Plaintiff’s commercial greed,” but nothing seemed to come of the company’s complaints.
Now, apparently, the app is back—or soon will be (we were unable to find it on the App Store as of this writing). According to parent Dana Nieder, whose daughter Maya used the app in order to improve her own speaking skills, PRC and Semantic have agreed to license two patents to the SFY creators with the agreement that no further takedowns will be requested—SFY will return to both Apple’s App Store as well as the Google Play store for Android as soon as each company can approve the apps.
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