Google found guilty of infringing Sonos patents
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Maybe these had a bit of innovation in 2003 but there is nothing substantial. I'm sure some pre-network audio equipment had to synchronize state and audio timing so doing it over the LAN is not (IMO) sufficient for a new patent.
In any case, software patents should be very strict and last at most 5 years (which is more like 8 years from application to expiry).
That, like many other software patents, is not "obvious is retrospect". It's not even "obvious idea at the time", it's less than that. It's just inertia. It's a decisionless decision.
It's patenting "not stepping in a puddle".
Besides, I don't think that consensus-based asynchronous state protocols like Paxos were widely available in 2003 (and even so, implementing Paxos on a resource-constrained device like e.g. an Arduino might still qualify for a patent in 2021).
This is the problem with software patents. The border between ideas and implementation is not as clear.
Strictly the answer to your question is no. Copyright protects the implementation, and patents protect the ideas. But where's the difference between an idea, and a design?
For software, what's the difference between a design and the implementation? Sure, you may actually have a separate design (and not "the implementation is the design"), but in software the step from "design" to "implementation" isn't "manufacturing".
Sure, even for physical goods, and their patents, the patent is often not sufficient to create a working system.
For those holding software patents, they have to also list all ideas they have around that. Because there are patent trolls who check for new patents, and then file patents around that, creating a mine field so tight that you cannot even use your own invention.
Analogy: you patent a laser pointer, and immediately someone patents all possible use cases for a laser pointer they can think of (point at things during presentation, aim weapons, exercise cats[1], project things onto a wall, stick the laser pointer in a handheld device, have a button on the laser pointer, non-chargable batteries in the laser pointer, chargable batteries, mains powered, capacitor powered, etc… etc…
Anyway, a comment field is not sufficient to explore just why software don't fit well under the model of patents.
[1] this is a real patent, by the way.
This is something I never understood. When someone submits those type of patents, the patent officer most certainly knows the 'prior art' original patent exists. So why is this not patent 'obviousness'?
Technically using a laser pointer to exercise a cat is a new invention. Technically after that exercising a dog is another invention.
But even when not as obvious as that, imagine that you file a patent for the phone, and immediately someone patents every "step two", like the phone exchange, the ring, etc, to the point where you can't actually use your invention without licensing the next step.
That's one reason patent applications can be vague. It's not that they are not going to do the next step, is that they are patenting step 1 now, and are "inventing" step two right after.
> devices synchronize state using a LAN
If that has anything to do with music latency, then it's not "nothing substantial". It's their core business and their flagship feature. What they do well, that others could not, is playing multiple speakers perfectly in sync. Either stereo, or multiple rooms, almost as many speakers as you want, connected via wired network, or wireless, or by their on mesh system. And each speaker is basically a separate computer. It's not connected by analogue cable.
Anyone who were looking for Sonos alternatives with that functionality knows it's very hard to find and suddenly their prices become somewhat justified.
In the end, it's as simple as 'seek to this point' and then check if the point is off by less than some threshold, don't do anything. I did a few other fancy things like not seeking until the 'heart beat' lined up a few times in a row (duration in heartbeat was same as difference in time since last heartbeat).
How is this different than syncronizing transactions between database servers or how GPS works?
I found a GPL license multi-room/device audio player that discussed this very lawsuit last year [1]. The developer raises the same point than anything like this will involve something resembling clock syncronization.
Looking through the lawsuit itself, about 90% of it is just comparing the end result of Sonos' & Google's products in that both let you add/group speakers, adjust volume and playback of the group, etc. I cannot find any claim that Google's implementation is a copy of Sonos'. It seems to try to sugest that is the case by bringing up that prior to Google's devices, Google had worked with Sonos and had access to details of their implementation.
It's lucky they wrote "playback device" and not "device" otherwise the entire IoT industry would be violating it.
> "We believe that most people involved in wireless home audio today infringe on our patents in one way or the other."
So, either:
- most people are stealing their technology, or
- most people have come up with the same solution independently.
For some reason the second case seems more likely to me. Unfortunately for the patent law it doesn't matter if you invent something independently - you're still infringing.[2]
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/29/21492671/sonos-google-pat...
[2]: https://www.patentprogress.org/2019/08/23/protecting-invento...
I think patents make sense to some degree, but they should expire much quicker and should not be transferrable.
But like many other things, it has been exploited, especially by big corporations. And the patents no longer work as intended. And the big problem is that theres so much money on the line that is it not easy to change. I would assume large corporations already spend absurd amounts of money on lobbying for the patent-rules to work in their favor.
Patents as a concept I am all for. It is a good way to make sure that new entrepreneurs can make it to market before "big-corp" steals their idea and just push them out. But they would have to change how they work to stop patent-sharks and the big exploitations by said big-corp.
Moreover, there are also many patent claims that are accepted and that refer to things that are either impossible or non-economical at the time when the patent is issued, but they are put in the patent to cover future devices that someone will be able to make after the current technological problems are solved.
In the distant past, most patent offices required a demonstration with a working device in which all the patent claims were embodied, so such bogus patent claims against future competitors could not be accepted.
Now, every year more patents are issued than anytime in the past, but most of them are just garbage that was not patented before just because everyone else would have been ashamed to attempt to file such patent applications.
The number of truly valid patents issued per year now is actually less than in the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century.
The same as for new movie scripts, it becomes more and more difficult to find something really original to which nobody thought before.
This reads an awful lot like the no true Scottsman fallacy. Care to elaborate?
Therefore I base my opinion only on anecdotal evidence.
I have read carefully a lot of patents. I have read completely a few hundreds and I have browsed through the pages of a few thousands. I believe that few people happen to read so many patents, unless their job requires precisely this.
The number of the patents that I have read has been distributed rather uniformly over the years since the start of the USPTO archive until today. Because the number of patents issued per year has increased steadily, that means that I have read a larger part of the early patents than of the most recent patents, which are probably too many for anyone to read, unless they choose a very narrow area of applicability.
Besides a lot of junk patents, I have also read a lot of very valuable patents, which marked important points in the history of technology.
However, all the really valuable patents that I have seen have been issued before 1980. I have read a few patents from the eighties that were somewhat interesting improvements of prior techniques, but I have never seen any really innovative patent issued after 1990.
The patents that I have read were not chosen randomly, but they were found either by searching for the history of various important technologies or by following the references to other patents from the patents themselves.
I believe that the patents that I have read are more likely to belong to the better patents, not to the worse. Therefore I think that the failure to find recent innovative patents in my sample is likely to be consistent with the low proportion of such patents in the entire set of recent patents.
Not all patents are junk, many present competent solutions to various technical problems, but nevertheless they do not contain anything really new, they are just new combinations of already known techniques, that could be found after some work by any competent team that would be hired to solve that problem. Such patents fail the criterion for patentability of being "non-obvious for someone skilled in the art".
There are also patents that do not cover actual inventions but discoveries of various useful things, e.g. some new alloy that was not predicted by some theory, but it was just found in a series of empirical experiments, or some bacteria that were isolated from some environment and that happen to contain a useful enzyme.
Such discoveries are very valuable, but they do not have the novelty that they had much earlier when nobody had yet clear ideas about how to search for new materials or microorganisms.
Now such searches are well understood and it is mostly a matter of having enough time and money to enable such a discovery.
Their function was always to create more property to capitalize. I'm not sure you could argue that this wasnt the intended effect. The idea that they ever spurred innovation was the "big lie".
There have been historical periods of explosive innovation that coincided with lax or no enforcement of intellectual property rules but never, as far as im aware, the reverse.
By requiring the source to be available with the software, licenses drove the free software movement.
No reason Linux couldnt exist. All software would effectively be FOSS by default.
GPL is here to make sure the source code doesn't stay secret, and it is an essential part of the Linux development process, the driver model in particular. In fact, I don't see how a community driven, widely supported, monolithic kernel could be made without a copyleft license.
Linux without GPL wouldn't be Linux, and out of the free OSes (BSD, GNU/HURD, Haiku, Minix, ...), Linux is the most successful.
Startups and labs should be able to patent so that they have a chance to make it in the market.
Software/algorithm patents? Yes.
At least one of the Sonos patents in question is of that nature: it merely describes a system of distributed loudspeakers where one loudspeaker can set the volume of other speakers in the group remotely. The claims completely omit any actual solution that accomplishes that.
On other hand I do think there is still need to protect innovation in more physical things. Like new manufacturing processes or material innovations like using novel chemistry.
I think there should be some line, probably non-obvious implementation.
So while there may be a difference on software and hardware patents in practice, this is not a valid difference in terms of what the legal provisions are.
To be fair, some of the patents that listed in another comment here as part of the lawsuit are quite precise in their claims. Their claims cover the actual algorithms for integrating another loudspeaker into a secure WLAN and for ensuring exact playback. That's the kind of detail level that I would expect from a patent. As a result, if you solve the same problem using a sufficiently different set of steps, you're fine.
There's a difference between the spirit in which a law or regulation is written and how it is applied in practice over time. In case of patents, this gap has become quite large. I think that this is why so many here want see changes.
But no, for all the evil patents are we must have them, because some guy found a new way to make milk foam. Jesus ducking christ hacker news, this is almost as funny as Paul Graham writing an essay about why VC is great.
But mainly, my intent was to point out that patents might be a necessary evil to fight off copycats. Without that protection, I cannot imagine how any hardware startup could be successful, because the established players will always have the factories, tools, and experience so that they can scale up faster as soon as a new desired product is found.
https://www.stephankinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/publicati...
Things were tight between them and Sonos until a Logitech pulled a Logitech and crippled the hardware lineup before killing the brand.
I now wonder if these patents had something to do with it.
> Plaintiff Sonos, Inc. (“Sonos” or “Plaintiff”) hereby asserts the following claims for patent infringement of United States Patent Nos. 8,588,949, 9,195,258, 9,219,959, 10,209,953, and 10,439,896 (“patents-in-suit”; attached hereto as Exhibits 1-5 respectively) against Defendant Google LLC (“Google” or “Defendant”)
> The innovations captured by these patents cover many important aspects of wireless multi-room audio devices/systems, including, for example, how to set up a playback device on a wireless local area network, how to manage and control groups of playback devices (e.g., how to adjust group volume of playback devices and how to pair playback devices together for stereo sound), and how to synchronize the play back of audio within groups of playback devices.
[1]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.76...
Here are direct links for the curious:
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US9195258B2
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US9219959B2
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US10209953B2
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US10439896B2
(Edit: Formatting)
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2
The ability to add separate speakers to groups, and control their volume via a single master volume control.
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US9195258B2
Covers two speakers synchronising playback by exchanging timing information between themselves. This one is not very clearly written.
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US9219959B2
A playback device that receives audio from the network and then equalises and plays it back, with two different equalisation settings. (This is for stereo output with two smart speakers.)
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US10209953B2
This is just a better worded and more specific version of the second patent. It describes how you would use timing information to synchronise playback. It's nothing clever - just the very obvious solution of using pings to measure the clock differences between the devices and then delaying the audio appropriately.
- https://patents.google.com/patent/US10439896B2
This is a description of the standard way of setting up smart devices - they announce their presence, you connect to them directly, send the wifi details, and then they indicate they have connected. I bet they wish they had just written "device" instead of "playback device" in this patent because then literally every smart device in the world would be violating it!
I was at least expecting some sophisticated synchronisation or room measurement stuff. But no, just 5 obvious patents that should never have been granted.
Would have expected it to also say “a search engine company called Google”
I'm a fan of patent trolls being defeated, but Sonos is not a troll. They're being pushed and cajoled by the famgopolies. Both Apple and Google cloned their product, then Google started to shutter access to Google Play Music / YouTube Music.
Google is like a capricious god of ancient Greek mythology. It might seem friendly, but it takes what it wants and leaves dead, ruined corpses by the wayside.
It gives sonos a monopoly over the entire idea, that they can enforce against the world.
It's like cheering a law that allows anyone who wore a violet shirt in the last month to be shot, because you know someone who wore a violet shirt who you think deserved it. Maybe, but laws apply to everyone, and you're poisoning the commons just to fuck over that one person.
[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9195258B2
[1] the mechanism claimed being obvious to someone skilled in the art should be a reason the patent is not valid, but US courts appear to have a history of making that difficult to prove.
Except the patent you link to doesn't sync the clocks.
The problem is that in today's world, a few players dominate the entire industry and can erase up and coming startups by simply pouring engineers and money into problems. Innovation can be copied on the cheap by these titans, leaving the hard working original inventor (companies with products and not trolls) with nothing to show.
Small companies with products (not trolls) need something to protect themselves against the giants. Because it certainly isn't a level playing field anymore.
Power is concentrated. Google and friends can't be the winners that take all.
I don't like patents. But there's no other way to survive when a giant wants to clone your product.