Google infringed on five Sonos patents, according to preliminary ruling | Hacker News Reader

Google infringed on five Sonos patents, according to preliminary ruling

techcrunch.com

47 pointsckrailo28 comments

It would be awesome if when reading a news article on court cases or patents, that your browser could automatically inform you about the actual patent or court case given the content of the article.

But implementing that would probably violate Microsoft patent on 'Extensibility for context-aware digital personal assistant' or one of the millions of other patents. It is better to not make that feature at all I guess.

I am not sure how anything gets made, unless you ignore patents, and then see if you get sued. No way the typical start-up is cognizant of the millions of patents they could potentially be violating. It would be impossible to even try to keep that in your head when being creative.

Researching and linking these things was classically the job of the journalist.

The first thing that came to mind is the banner under YouTube videos that appears when YouTube wants to insert their point of view about something. "This video is about X. Find out more about X." Imagine the power one could wield if you controlled such a feature with wide adoption.

This article had a cursory description of the patent(s) that was (were) allegedly violated:

https://www.engadget.com/sonos-google-itc-compliant-initial-...

Looks like the primary, initial complaint was around the tuning feature for the speakers. There is a link to subsequent complaints.

If you have a Sonos, when you first set up a speaker you use wave your mobile around while the speaker emits a tone and your phone mic sends it feedback on how to optimize the sound.

Werent there audio system calibrators in the nineties doing room calibration in similar manner (microphone on a cable)?

I had an old Bose surround sound system that did the same thing. You'd place the mic in the best seat in the room and it'd tune the phase to center the sound.

My Sony surround sound box does this too...

Yep my Denon did this in 2000

Hopefully, once they've sorted out their patent squabbles, Sonos and Google can enable better integration between their systems.

Right now, Sonos's Google Home/Assistant integration feels half-baked, and playing music is a much better experience on iOS due to the AirPlay 2 integration.

That’s entirely on Google and it pisses me off. It goes beyond squabbles as Google has repeatedly dealt in bad faith with Sonos to the detriment of the consumer. I still remember seeing Sonos demoing both Alexa and Google active on one speaker and also remember the hissy fit Google threw and the fallout when they withdrew from the project. It took two years for Google to come back to the table and the result is the intentionally crippled implementation that you see today

This is ridiculous. Pretty soon you don't be able to stream to a Raspberry Pi connected to a speaker without violating a patent. Their failure to even state what the patent is leads me to believe it is something basic like this which means I will never buy a Sonos product.

> Their failure to even state what the patent is

Yes, TechCrunch is garbage.

I have to disagree with you. Sonos was founded by a couple of ex-JBL employees who created one of, if not the best consumer wireless stereo & home theater systems over the years.

Their business model is not to release brand new products each year, but to release improvements through software to existing hardware. One of those software features was TruePlay which existing users of Sonos were able to have free of charge. This was part of the patent that Google was copying.

I hear a lot of people complaining when large companies such as Google or Apple gobble up smaller companies or use their market power to drown out competitors. This is one of those scenarios, but through blatant patent copying.

I am always in favour of large companies being caught copying technology developed by smaller players in the market, which clearly produce quality products. Also, of course those part of the legal investigation know what the patent is.

The issue here is that people will file a patent for anything, and when it comes to technology companies are abusing the patent process to mean something that would normally be repeated by anyone developing a product or simply by trial and error independently. It is like saying... I first figured out how to turn milk into butter so if you want to turn milk into butter and sell it you now have to pay me, even though you figured out how to do it on your own. It is ridiculous and people that defend this type of patent legislation have no clue how much it is affecting innovation within the US.

Agreed, however there's clearly a balance here between something like turning milk into butter and patenting the maglev train. If you develop a sophisticated way that is unmatched by your competitors in which wireless speakers can transmit radio signals carrying audio. In a way that has little interruption across weak WiFi signals throughout a home and that's purely your business and innovation platform. Then I see no problem in it.

Heck Apple have a patent for a paper bag... my point is that its not necessarily about patenting turning milk into butter, but if you find a way to do it better than anyone has and you are a business that has put all of your R&D into perfecting that process in a market of other butter makers, then its fine. If they want your invention they can pay for it.

> Pretty soon you don't be able to stream to a Raspberry Pi connected to a speaker without violating a patent.

I think you must have blinked. For a couple decades.

> you don't be able to stream to a Raspberry Pi connected to a speaker without violating a patent

Nobody is gonna send you a c&d for personal use

> Nobody is gonna send you a c&d for personal use

Practically, no. Theoretically they could. I believe there's no "personal use" exemption on patents under most law systems (there was one in UK maybe?).

I think the "personal use" exemption is twofold: nobody will know you're doing it, and if they find out, you don't have any money. Companies sue Google because they are LOADED with cash, which they want. Your lifetime value rounds down to zero at that scale.

Will they kill an open source project?

In general yes, companies have no qualms about killing open source projects when they get a whiff of patent infringement. AFAIK Sonos hasn't done that to any projects as of today but that doesn't mean they wouldn't.

They sure are on par with Google in caring not that much about their users.

https://www.classaction.org/news/sonos-docked-with-class-act...

What are the patents?

9,195,258: System and method for synchronizing operations among a plurality of independently clocked digital data processing devices https://patents.google.com/patent/US9195258B2/en

10,209,953: Playback device https://patents.google.com/patent/US10209953B2/en

9,219,959: Multi-channel pairing in a media system https://patents.google.com/patent/US9219959B2/en

8,588,949: Method and apparatus for adjusting volume levels in a multi-zone system https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en

10,439,896: Playback device connection https://patents.google.com/patent/US10439896B2/en

Pro tip #1: Just read Claim 1, to get the gist. That doesn't suffice for a serious analysis, of course, but it pretty well tells you what the patent is about.

Generally, these are about two or more output devices (speakers?) coordinating with each other. There might be dependent claims about waving your phone around, but I didn't read that far.

Pro tip #2: the priority date(s). These seem to be 2003, 2004, and 2006. Those were all well within the internet era. So if you think "everyone was doing that!" you have to prove it with prior art before those dates. You can be certain the tech advisors in Patent Litigation have been trying to do that.

These are pretty low-quality patents. I'm curious if Google tried to attack the non-obvious requirement. These seem like straight-forward naive UIs.

On legal matters: those who know, don't talk, and those who talk, don't know.

That said: I don't know. The claims weren't about UIs, AFAICT -- they were mostly about network sync'ing of the speakers.

I also never dealt with ITC matters. Quite different from a "regular" infringement suit.

8,588,949 - Method and apparatus for adjusting volume levels in a multi-zone system

9,195,258 - System and method for synchronizing operations among a plurality of independently clocked digital data processing devices

9,219,959 - Multi-channel pairing in a media system

10,209,953 - Playback device

10,439,896 - Playback device connection

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