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by dmoy 1771 days ago
> 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

2 comments

> 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...