I know they made some funky decision in recent history. What are the points that you dislike about them? Curious as someone who is always on the fence about their products but still use them.
They treat their hardware like it's a phone or computer, something to upgrade every year or two and old versions discarded. They have no problem bricking it in a couple of years and expect you to buy a newer version. Perfectly functional hardware.
This last round of bricking was to bring about a faster CPU in the speakers, as if that matters. Didn't add features, just faster CPU.
Their support is pretty atrocious. They will always blame your router for not handling "point to point internal networking" correctly, as if that's a real possibility. They tell you you have to make one of their speakers your router and your current router needs to be put in AP mode.
Honestly they probably needed the faster CPU because they expect any of their speakers to be used a routers.
Oh I completely agree that's what they should be doing. But support wants you to put your router as an access point behind a sonos speaker, meaning the sonos speaker has to be capable of handing all your internet traffic as well as play music.
They broke literally all my hardware with an upgrade path. I had 6 or so sonos speakers which are now just pretty white bricks. Theoretically some of them will be usable if I update the app to the new sonos app but when I try that it (firstly) says some of them aren't compatible with the new app and (secondly) just plain doesn't find any of the others. And yes I have tried connecting them directly so I have a hub with just my wifi router and the sonos device connected via ethernet and I'm standing right next to it with my phone showing 5 bars of wifi strength and it can't find the speaker.
> Patents should benefit small companies with actual products in the market.
Which would be great, except as the ruling states, Sonos didn't introduce the feature in the market until 5 years after Google did:
> The essence of this order is that the patents issued after an unreasonable, inexcusable, and prejudicial delay of over thirteen years by the patent holder, Sonos, Inc. Sonos filed the provisional application from which the patents in suit claim priority in 2006...Google then began introducing its own products that practiced the invention in 2015. Even so, Sonos waited until 2019 to pursue claims on the invention (and until 2020 to roll out the invention in its own product line).
Apparently synchronized speakers grouped to zones, with the possibility for the zones to overlap so that one speaker could be in multiple zones rather than just one. To quote the judge:
> Then, in 2019, Sonos filed continuation applications for the patents in suit. To get around the prior art, Sonos sought to patent zone scenes with a new twist: overlap. With overlap, a zone player could be a member of more than one zone scene at the same time
It turns out that what Sonos did was even more scummy than implied by lights0123. In addition to this being something Sonos didn't implement until much later, it was actually Google who first suggested this idea to Sonos.
> This was thirteen years after Sonos filed the provisional application, but also five years after Google had itself disclosed overlapping zone scenes to Sonos, and four years after Google had released products that implemented the feature.
Your description got me wondering if Sonos had actually done anything novel so I decided to go and dig up the actual patent. Best I can tell, it's this one:
Spoiler, it contains a detailed description of the functionality, complete with UI mockups and flow charts. It does not contain any novel method for keeping audio in sync between rooms, for example.
Like small companies patent trolling bigger ones as their entire business model.
Patents as a whole is entirely negative force. The original thought to make the inventor be able to profit off the invention is long gone. Near every single one is corporate backed and used to stem the competition
I don't see how patents on trivial stuff like synchronized playback are supposed to help startups. The big corporations are sitting on enormous piles of those which makes entering their markets extremely risky.
It might not be trivial to achieve technically, but at the point you have multiple speakers dotted around a multi-room space, making them all play the same thing in sync is a fairly obvious idea, which I think is more what is being argued here.
Depends how broadly it’s claimed. A detailed claim that gets into the technical specifics of how this is implemented might well be nonobvious. A broad claim that covers all possible ways of synchronizing audio is a tougher sell.
But the patents are often not on the technical implementation nitty-gritty, but on the very general idea of "Two speakers that play the same song in sync".
The latter ("concept patents") just stifle innovation.
>To protect giant companies against small startups that are trying with all of their might? I'm not so sure.
Startups aren't trying to compete with large companies, they're trying to get bought up by them. If your goal is to compete, patents are a nice-to-have, but you can still compete on being more flexible than a giant lumbering tech company. The whole mythology of "disruption" depends on it, because there are natural diseconomies of scale. When you get big, you get stupid.
If your goal is acquisition, however, then patents are entirely necessary, because otherwise - what are tech companies buying?
In this case, Google should be allowed to clone the shit out of Sonos, and Sonos should have legally mandated access to the YouTube Music accounts of any user who consents to Sonos products accessing their data. Interoperability is far more important to startups that are actually trying to remain independent rather than providing a nice juicy VC exit. With the current state of "IP"[0], any startup trying to build an interoperable product is at the mercy of their competitors who can kill the API keys of products they are cloning.
I'd rather live in the world where big tech is at constant risk of being scraped to death than the world where the only thing startups can bring to the table are poorly-worded and overbroad patents that big tech can use to kill other startups.
[0] Read: laws that let you opt out of having competitors. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) falls under this umbrella.
You have to consider the fact that workarounds are dime a dozen.
In any case, startups aren't exactly in a position to gamble away their endowment in a court battle, which can trivially get stretched out by their megacorp opponents until they run out of cash.
> To protect giant companies against small startups that are trying with all of their might? I'm not so sure.
They ain't doing it now either.
I think more useful model might be shortening it (5 years for anything but medical and such ought to be enough to monetize most) and enforcing profit share into patent law itself.
say 20% of the revenue on the product divided to the owners of patent used (excluding subsidiares and other related entities of company using patent).
Then the original "inventor" (as joke as it is in software...) gets not only the money but also good profit margin advantage over big corp to market
any interest in going as far as changing that article of the constitution?
I feel it is almost unworkable enough
I don’t feel as if enough important people care enough the same way as irrelevant people would care
relevant because the only populist legislative changes that occur are the ones that coincidentally match what the elite class was already interested in
>A California federal judge has thrown out a $32.5 million verdict for wireless-audio company Sonos (SONO.O) against rival Google (GOOGL.O) after finding that the Sonos patents at the heart of the case were unenforceable.
I am used to seeing statements that these legal cases cost $$$$ in legal fees, so I am curious what is likely to have been the spend on either side of the case. A $32.5 million verdict is likely significantly lower than Sonos had hoped. What was that likely to have been as a ratio of legal fees? Would Google have hired outside consul to help defend or is the in house staff sufficient to handle the case?
It also materially changed the experience of Google's products for the worse. I am curious how that might have impacted their bottom line (as small as home devices are to their business).
The 32 million is pocket change. What's important is whether the import ban on infringing Google devices is related to this judgement, or if that was a separate case.