[echelon]

To protect against trolls, sure.

To protect giant companies against small startups that are trying with all of their might? I'm not so sure.

In this case, Google can now clone Sonos' hardware and synchronized play algorithms and block Sonos from accessing YouTube Music.

I'm tired of Google, Apple, and Meta winning by default. They have unlimited resources to clone startups' entire products.

Big companies should be way more vulnerable to disruption.

[fsh]

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.

[fidotron]

Synchronized playback is absolutely not trivial.

[cr3ative]

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.

[NotYourLawyer]

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.

[adhesive_wombat]

Then you patent the specific method, not just the idea of "make speakers play at the same time, but with a computer"

[nikanj]

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.

[ilyt]

Yeah entire week of dev time to figure out /s

[kmeisthax]

>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.

[maven29]

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.

[prmoustache]

What does this patent has to do with Google blocking them from accessing YouTube Music?

[ilyt]

> 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

[hackernewds]

> In this case, Google can now clone Sonos' hardware and synchronized play algorithms and block Sonos from accessing YouTube Music.

how did you come to this outcome, that Google could and would do this?