[echelon]

This sucks for Sonos.

Google can clone the Sonos hardware and kick Sonos off of YouTube Music. Which is exactly what they tried doing before.

Patents should benefit small companies with actual products in the market. The world shouldn't revolve around five tech giants.

[lights0123]

> 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).

[Spare_account]

>Sonos waited until 2019 to pursue claims on the invention (and until 2020 to roll out the invention in its own product line).

What was the feature that Sonos introduced in 2020 that was being fought over?

[jsnell]

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.

It's interesting to read the comments from half a year ago with this knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36093764

[rjst01]

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:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7571014B1/en

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.

It is insane to me that this is patentable.

[realusername]

> 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.

Every software patent is like this, I've never seen anything relevant yet that I can't come up myself thinking about domain. They are very vague and useless on purpose.

[rossjudson]

Genelec 8250A active monitoring (speaker) systems were in production from 2006 to 2016. The Product Documentation (2006) has on page 7 screenshots showing the ability to define multiple groups of speakers and jointly control the volume level for groups via LAN. Extensive customization included individual time delays as well.

So back in 2006 Genelec was already doing all of this and had shipped products to the market.

https://www.genelec.com/previous-models/8250a

https://assets.ctfassets.net/4zjnzn055a4v/2Jy6loSGRWecUWacsq...

https://www.genelec.com/-/blog/glm-and-smart-active-monitori...

[plagiarist]

That should not be patentable.

[ilyt]

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