[nceqs3]

Remember the ITC is NOT a court, it's part of the executive branch. Their decisions are appealable to the federal circuit but they are effectively never stayed pending appeal (because there is already an appeals process built into the ITC).

There is an interesting counterintuitive game that is played where the defendant tries to get MORE of their products included in the exclusion order to make an appeal easier.

Sonos could have requested a general exclusion order which would bar ANY infringing product from entering the US, but they only requested a limited exclusion order against Google Home products.

Let the lobbying games begin... I am fairly confident that Biden will not overturn the ITC decision but you never know.

Google also counter sued Sonos over Google's patents in multiple jurisdictions and Sonos has made it clear to investors that this is all a fight for a settlement.

[dodobirdlord]

At some point it becomes worth it to put in the effort to try to get the Sonos patents invalidated, and some of them seem very broad. Hard to believe that some of those things were “invented” only in the last 20 years. Most inventions aren’t patented, so I’d speculate that probably almost all patents could be invalidated by someone dedicated with a team of experts to scour history for prior art.

[HotHotLava]

There was nothing comparable to a modern multiroom smart speaker around in 2001, so they certainly were invented in the last 20 years. Whether that was by Sonos or by someone else, and whether these specific patents should have been granted is another question of course.

[bluGill]

I remember musik in the 1990s at the restaurant I worked at. We had it in the kitchen and a different channel in the seating area. Turn a switch on the wall to change channels, if the kitchen and seating were on the same channel then they had music in sync.

Now this was an entirely hardwired system, and there was no remote. I don't know what sonos's patents are for, but the idea was in place and the difference is do it by wireless computer.

[HotHotLava]

This particular patent specifically covers a mesh network of independent playback devices that can be dynamically rearranged into possibly overlapping zones, with the volume controls being on a separate device in the local network. That's pretty far removed from a simple hard-wired two-channel audio system.

I'm opposed to software patents in general so I also think this should not be patentable, but it's hard to deny that there's a ton of engineering effort required to implement such a system and its not just a matter of adding a few lines of code to an existing audio application.

[bluGill]

Right. I'm not clear on what the patent covers, it can be anything from too broad to very specific. My opinion changes depending on what it covers.