David v Goliath –
Sonos showed Google its tech years ago without realizing they would compete.
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The publicly traded, Santa Barbara, California-based audio company sued Google in a federal court and the US International Trade Commission. The goal is to block sales of some of Google’s products (including smart speakers and smartphones, among other things) and to collect financial damages.************** According to the article, Sonos “handed over the effective blueprints to its speakers “to Google in 2019 during an effort to make Google’s services work on said speakers. Sonos did not anticipate it then, but Google later launched smart speakers that competed directly with Sonos’ offerings. After Google’s speakers hit the market, Sonos employees purchased some and used packet sniffing to analyze how the Google speakers worked with each other. They say they discovered that the speakers used technological solutions that Sonos has previously developed and patented. (They claim to have found the same when testing Amazon’s Echo speakers, too.)
Sonos says it notified Google of the alleged infringement on multiple occasions over the past few years, but Google was unwilling either to recognize it or to adequately compensate the smaller company. On one occasion, it reportedly responded by claiming Sonos was infringing on Google’s intellectual property as well.
Sonos filed acomplaintagainst Google in US District Court for the Central District of California. In the complaint, Sonos says that its “patents cover important aspects of wireless multi-room audio systems, such as setting up a playback device on a wireless local area network, managing and controlling groups of playback devices (eg, adjusting group volume of playback devices and pairing playback devices together for stereo sound), and synchronizing playback of audio within groups of playback devices. “
Below: Images of the Sonos One smart speaker, from our review when the product was first introduced.
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said the following in a public statement:
The litigation path is not without its risks, as smaller companies like Sonos have reason to be nervous about retaliation. The New York Times report notes that when Sonos “intensified its demands that Google license its technology,” Google applied stricter conditions to Sonos for using Google Assistant in its devices, including a “mandate to turn over the planned name, design, and targeted state date of its future products “months in advance. Google’s own products compete with those for which the Silicon Valley giant sought that information.
Further, like many other tech companies, Sonos is dependent on Google and Amazon in other ways. It relies on Google’s advertising products to reach consumers, it uses Amazon’s servers, and it sells a significant number of its speakers through Amazon’s storefront. There may be nothing stopping Google or Amazon from using those dependencies to retaliate in the United States, though there is no evidence that they have done so against Sonos so far. Below: Images of the Google Home Mini smart speaker, from our review when the product was first introduced.
Google and Amazon have both released statements denying that they’ve copied Sonos’ technology or infringed on its patents. In a comment
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