Sonos sues Google for allegedly stealing smart speaker tech

theverge.com

18 points·mikece··5 comments

> The lawsuit cites numerous news reports that point out similarities between Google’s new product features and systems that Sonos had already pioneered, including synchronizing audio across groups of speakers, adjusting the group volume, and setting up devices on a local wireless network.

This makes Sonos sound like a common patent troll. Sounds like sour grapes to me.

I remember iTunes doing synchronized audio well years ago and Sonos didn't make a peep.

Apple released the airport express with an audio out and did synchronization with audio playing from the computer audio outs a full year(2004) before Sonos's first product hit the market (2005).

Besides that, wouldn't they have to have patented a specific implementation? I can think of thousands of ways two implementations can differ for those features.

Sonos claims that Amazon has also violated its patents with the Echo device family, but the Times writes that its executives decided against “battling two tech giants in court at once.”

This seems unusual, considering how much is at stake.

Or are there other reasons that Sonos wants to avoid suing Amazon at the same time (cases being combined, hoping for a successful outcome in the Google case to get Amazon to settle, etc.)

Amazon would probably pull sonos from their site. They have been known to play dirty in this market before..

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