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Comment by suddenexample | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, these are the patents mentioned in the document:

Method and apparatus for adjusting volume levels in a multi-zone system - https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en

System and method for synchronizing operations among a plurality of independently clocked digital data processing devices - https://patents.google.com/patent/US9195258B2/en

Multi-channel pairing in a media system - https://patents.google.com/patent/US9219959B2/en

Playback device - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10209953B2/en

Playback device connection - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10439896B2/en

I'm a big fan of Sonos products but this ruling won't go through, right? Doesn't this effectively make Sonos the only legal manufacturer of wireless speaker systems? It's not like two speakers individually playing L and R channels is a novel concept... Plus it apparently bans imports on "Google Home smart speakers, Pixel phones and computers, and Google’s Chromecast streaming video device".

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> System and method for synchronizing operations among a plurality of independently clocked digital data processing devices - https://patents.google.com/patent/US9195258B2/en

This one in particular seems way too broad. So... they have a patent on the concept of deducting latency from a message to synchronize clocks? (and then sending data with a timestamp for when it will play?)

I wonder if they keep their server times in sync with ntp.

Interesingly, none of the specific claims referenced in the decision have to do with clock synchronization, they all focus on the act of grouping speakers in some way and controlling them together.

Irrespective of the patent details, this is actually a fun and not at all straightforward hardware project to implement. I had a failed attempt at this in uni, and synchronizing audio across multiple computers (rasps) is a really cool challenge.

But did you pay the rent to Sonos while you were doing that project? It's, after all, their intelectual property now.

You don't know the year he/she went to University.

you do know that raspis were involved, so it can't be before 2012. However, AirFoil/AirPlay existed before that and could do this.

> Method and apparatus for adjusting volume levels in a multi-zone system - https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en

Is this why I can’t change the volume on a Google Home speaker group anymore?

I'm with you 100% here.

It's unclear how often Googhomes receive updates, but at the beginning in 2019 my 9 Mini's worked great! But now for multiple speakers they are laggy and unreliable, sometimes just ending up in a neverending ding loop.

Unfortunate to buy a product such as this and have functionality and experience quality steadily decline thereafter.

Initially I was a huge fan and in love with the product.

Perhaps I should've known better, since Big-G isn't exactly known for long-term support of anything unless it still makes them torrents of money.

Sonos are in a similar boat, buy an older controller and the app will constantly nag you to upgrade, but not allow you to upgrade because the controller is "too old and no longer compatible".

I don't use speaker groups, but could possibly be related to this issue from Android 12 -- where it seems Google walked back, disabled, or pulled out previously present functionality, possibly related to this litigation: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/201546605?pli=1

I wonder if any of those cover switching devices. You used to be able to say, "Hey Google, move that to the kitchen," and whatever you were listening to would stop and continue in the kitchen. It still understands the command, but then fails with an error. That feature was something that I used every morning as I moved through the house getting ready for the day.

I can't point to a single thing that these devices do better than they did two years ago, but I can list several features that were important to me that are now either broken or missing.

I noticed this not working the other day as well.

Honestly, my feeling is that using Google Home is asking for trouble and frustration. It already barely works, but it's not hard to imagine some future where the company that built your front door lock is ordered to stop providing service by some court that finds it in violation of a patent.

Google has confirmed some of these changes are related to this case, yes: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/11/04/google-phones-ch...

Prior to this ITC ruling, Google had already received an injunction in Germany.

Behind closed doors, I like to ask CEOs these questions:

“What patents are holding you back?”

“What would you build right now if there were no restrictions from copyright/patents?”

There are some very surprising (caveat: not to most of HN) patents that are holding us back.

Google will probably have to get the patents themselves removed, by proving prior work or such. Those patents are way too broad.

I wonder what Bose does, they have their own multiroom system. Do they license the patents from Sonos?

> Do they license the patents from Sonos?

IIRC Some other companies made agreements with Sonos to avoid suites (incl apple i blieve?), but sonos has claimed that google was bullying them over a number of things, including the claim that GAssistant only supports one assistant/wake word at a time, per contract, but alexa does not have this limitation. But thats apparently why the android app is worse, they don't support casting, and they're focusing on the apple/alexa ecosystem (airplay, etc).

The major feature the Android app lacks is the "Trueplay" tuning. It relies on a phone to generate and record a sound to map out a room's acoustics, then optimizes the Sonos speaker's output for the room. I've always been wondering if the lack of Trueplay support is due to shortcomings in Android's audio APIs or something like this.

Things like that usually require knowing the hardware characteristics of the device itself as well as some form of calibration range. For iOS Sonos can just buy (or borrow) a couple of iphones every year to generate that data. Doing the same on Android gets a lot harder thanks to the more diverse hardware ecosystem.

The patent system is so broken.

Yes, so broken that the original inventors of a product class had to spend $50 million on litigation in not even a court, but rather a quasi court in DC after a trillion dollar company stole their IP, because it's the last place where patent holders in the US get a reasonably fair shake.

Software patents are an anathema on innovation. I'd go so far as to say all corporate patents are a hindrance to innovation. We're not in the days of singular inventors profiting off their inventions, which I'm fine with, as when corporations become patent trolls or create such broad patents like "able to play back on a device," then it gets a little ridiculous.

In my opinion all intellectual property restrictions reduce the rate of innovation, with the sum total of all present day laws dramatically reducing the rate of innovate compared to what it could be. For example 3D printers were patented in 1989, then first sold for $50k in 1995, sold still under patent for $25k ten years later, then patents expired in 2008, within three years a decent printer was $1800, and ten years after patents expired they were $250 available worldwide. Today Prusa Research ships more 3D printers in three weeks than Stratasys sold for the first 20 years of their operation.

Imagine how much more productive mechanical engineers would have been if they had cheap 3D printers a decade sooner, and what the cumulative follow on effects would have been for the world. And then imagine what the economy would be like if everything moved that fast? It would change the nature of investment from less frequent massive investments to more frequent smaller investments as companies copied each other at will, but the rate of growth would be amazing! Think of how cheap we could make MRI machines and other medical imaging devices if this theory holds for that field.

Not to mention the extreme worldwide inequality perpetuated by intellectual property restrictions. How fast would the African continent develop if they were legally allowed to clone and copy the world's best manufacturing equipment and product designs.

Intellectual property is a disaster for humankind. So many people believe a fable about IP with no material basis in reality. We're told IP "encourages innovation" even when the actual material function of IP restrictions is to prohibit innovation around any patented idea.

On the other hand, if you're a startup founder with a brilliant new idea (say, some new way to synchronize audio across multiple speakers), why would you ever leave a cushy corporate job to build it if nothing protects you from large corporations copying everything you've made?

It seems, judging by how people have been complaining that their Google Homes have been doing worse, that maybe the system is working as intended and Google ought to pay for patent licenses to the people who first took the risk to build these multispeaker systems and proved that it was a good idea.

It's possible that the solution isn't to scrap intellectual property entirely but update the numbers to reflect the more innovative and interconnected world of 2022 instead of the 1600s when it was officially conceived.

I think you're missing the fact that our entire world is being slowed down by this system, and a few tweaks are not going to change that. Yes it is true that in the current system Google could ask for permission to license this one patent, but what about the broader implications of patents as I have laid out? What about the people all over the world living in worse conditions than necessary due to intellectual property restrictions? How many people could have been enjoying a worldwide free library if Project Gutenburg had been allowed to continue? How much cheaper would cars and auto repair be if manufacturers cloned and copied each other to settle on a set of standard designs, as has been done in 3D printers? How many lives would have been saved in Swaziland/Eswatini in the 1990's if the WTO had not outlawed low cost clones of effective AIDS medications? [1]

For every potential startup founder who will only work on their problem if they can get paid, there are IMO 100 people who will work on a problem because they care about solving it. I don't think we would lose much if those motivated only by profit had less incentive. And keep in mind they would still have first mover advantage. Plus huge companies often don't care about little corners of the market, and there is lots of room for companies to serve market needs the bigger companies are ignoring. But if another company wants to compete and they can actually do a better job? We are hurting society if we restrict their ability to do that.

[1] https://www.mmegi.bw/features/the-neoliberal-plague-aids-and...

I don't believe you're correct that intellectual property has slowed down progress.

Linux and the GNU project use copyright and they're doing well. Arguably better than the permissive BSDs for which copyright law might as well not exist. But even GNU/Linux falls far behind Windows and MacOS for regular desktop users.

Software is already the ultimate gift-able creation where you can make something for yourself and everyone else. It's cheap to make at home and it's free to distribute. Yet even here commercial products protected by IP are still far superior to things made by hobbyists just wanting to share with the world.

Medicines? Most biotechnologists I know are working at university research labs aiming to churn papers or they're working at a company that exists because of patent law. I don't know anyone researching new drugs in their spare time just to gift it to the world.

So I guess as a counterpoint, I know a hundred startup founders who made something looking to make a buck. I know zero people working on expensive technical problems purely because they care about solving it.

Literally every new drug approved between 2010 and 2016 came from NIH funding.

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/10/2329

The biotechnologists I know tell me "patent law is totally screwed up for biomed, but I guess because it works for traditional tech it's near impossible to remove". They're flabbergasted when I tell them tech says the inverse. Everywhere seems to have this idea that this other niche absolutely requires it.

> On the other hand, if you're a startup founder with a brilliant new idea (say, some new way to synchronize audio across multiple speakers), why would you ever leave a cushy corporate job to build it if nothing protects you from large corporations copying everything you've made?

The fact that your product will be on the market for years before competition arrives and you'll be a step ahead.

Instead, we're now stuck in a situation where jackboots for corporate lawyers break the neck of any startup innovator before they can even launch new products.

It’s true. Many pro-patent people say “think of the little guy”, but in reality the little guy regularly gets the shaft on matters of patent monopoly.

On the other hand without patents the little guys could copy existing products, make them better (big corporations are slow) and be paid for that.

I don't know about this. Without protection from copiers, there is no incentive for anyone to create a new mechanism or invention. It's true that patents can slow the growth of an invention after it is created, but you haven't accounted whether patents incentivize more inventions. That might (and probably does) outweigh the technological progress on a particular invention that a monopoly impedes.

> Without protection from copiers, there is no incentive for anyone to create a new mechanism or invention.

Totally untrue and this is one of the weird myths people have been taught, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. Very likely this website is running on Linux, an OS created in part by corporate contributors but also in a huge way created by people who work while explicitly enabling free copies of their work. And of course with my 3D printer example, thousands of hackers from all over the world contributed to design improvements because they wanted to, sharing their work for free as open source. And then there's Bunnie Huang's wonderful story on the ground from a highly productive space with rampant copying:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

If you believe "there is no incentive" then none of the above would be true, but since it is true I would invite you to think critically about your starting assumptions.

No incentive might be hyperbolic, but this is an HN comment. I meant less incentive.

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf

I would welcome a world where copyright restrictions ended 15 years from date of creation as this paper suggests, which would be a huge improvement from the status quo. Sadly the paper only seems to go over copyright.

But take the 3D printer example. Development by my subjective take seemed way more effective without patents. So why have them at all? More people did more work on them after the patents expired. Why have any period of limited growth if there will simply be more growth without the restrictions?

Well, I haven't proven completely that this concept is universally true, but I worry that "playing it safe" and just fighting to keep shorter restrictions is like loosening the rope around your neck when you really should remove it.

And your paper suggests they have a really nice formula ("99% confidence interval") for calculating the optimal term. But how would you calculate the optimal term for patents on AIDS medications during the height of the AIDS pandemic in Africa in the 1990's.[1] How much is each life worth? I question anyone who thinks their formula can calculate optimality on figures alone.

[1] https://www.mmegi.bw/features/the-neoliberal-plague-aids-and...

EDIT: I should underscore that there are a lot of natural reasons why someone would be in a position to invest in a particular innovation. We say we love free markets because natural incentives work best. No constraints but the laws of physics. IP restrictions are very unnatural.

The argument would probably be that without patents, what reason does companies have to disclose methods of operation? Everything would become a trade-secret.

With patents the deal is as follows: Tell us how you made it and we will make sure that noone else copies it for a while. This system allows for knowledge to be shared between competing entities. One of the requirements for a patent is literally "The descriptions must be sufficient to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains to make and use the same".

For medication, the reason why it can even go off-patent is because the patent exists in the first place. Without the patent, there would be no public information about how to make the medication.

I'm not saying that this is the case for all inventions. But I do think that patents have their place. The current form might however need revisiting.

Maybe everything would become a trade secret but given what is at stake I wouldn’t assume that to be true. We’ve seen in the open source world that collaboration can be a valuable tool for everyone involved. Even big industry players understand there are benefits to open source.

And for medication we see companies abusing the patent system, reformulating drugs and re-patenting them. Though there’s something rotten about the other parts of the system that make this worthwhile.

Yes, anyone who obtains a software patent is just a cheater, because they take advantage of the fact that now it is possible to obtain patents for things that could not be patented a half of century before.

If at the start of the computing industry it would have been possible to obtain the kind of software patents that are awarded now, nobody would have ever been able to write any programs without infringing patents, including those who now claim the right of forbidding to others to rediscover the same trivial methods for which they happened to file patent applications before others, mainly because nobody before them thought that such things are worthy of a patent.

If to their predecessors would have been granted the same kinds of software patents as today, none of those wanting to obtain software patents now could have been working in the computing industry, as it would have been much smaller.

Even the smallest physical design or computer program embodies numerous ideas that fortunately were discovered in a time when for anyone who discovered something new, the priority was to make it known to the public, without expecting many rewards besides the recognition of priority in advancement of science and technology.

So broken that the original inventors aren't even part of the conversation, because neither the plaintiff or defendant invented any of this.

Sonos has worked hard since its founding to quietly amass an impressive stable of streaming audio IP.

It's not a matter of "if" anyone is infringing on their IP. It's a matter of "who can they reasonably win a ruling against".

The "novelty" (idk how novel it is really, but they present it as such) is not in speakers playing the same audio or L/R at the same time, but individual autonomous playback devices being grouped and ungrouped, so that they can be controlled as a unit when grouped.

"Simple Jack panel, but computer controlled" is not novel and should not be patentable.

Yeah, I'm absolutely not arguing this should be patentable. It seems like they are obvious and marginal (at best) changes to preexisting systems, even if they were the first ones to describe them. Still, the patents are not as boundlessly broad as some commenters here seem to think, for instance they clearly exclude hard-wired multispeaker systems.

To those downvoting: Am I wrong here? Not defending the patents, I just want people to stop tearing down strawmen instead of the real thing.

This sounds an awful lot like what I've been able to do with digital theatre sound systems for a long time, so I don't think it's novel.

Where is the Logitech/Squeezebox/Slim Devices patent war chest here? They have had volume on multi zone prior to 2012, syncing audio playback devices together, as well as having multichannel audio going to different squeezeboxes. These all seem to have at least prior art behind them and thus are indefensible.

Remember the ITC is NOT a court, it's part of the executive branch. Their decisions are appealable to the federal circuit but they are effectively never stayed pending appeal (because there is already an appeals process built into the ITC).

There is an interesting counterintuitive game that is played where the defendant tries to get MORE of their products included in the exclusion order to make an appeal easier.

Sonos could have requested a general exclusion order which would bar ANY infringing product from entering the US, but they only requested a limited exclusion order against Google Home products.

Let the lobbying games begin... I am fairly confident that Biden will not overturn the ITC decision but you never know.

Google also counter sued Sonos over Google's patents in multiple jurisdictions and Sonos has made it clear to investors that this is all a fight for a settlement.

At some point it becomes worth it to put in the effort to try to get the Sonos patents invalidated, and some of them seem very broad. Hard to believe that some of those things were “invented” only in the last 20 years. Most inventions aren’t patented, so I’d speculate that probably almost all patents could be invalidated by someone dedicated with a team of experts to scour history for prior art.

There was nothing comparable to a modern multiroom smart speaker around in 2001, so they certainly were invented in the last 20 years. Whether that was by Sonos or by someone else, and whether these specific patents should have been granted is another question of course.

I remember musik in the 1990s at the restaurant I worked at. We had it in the kitchen and a different channel in the seating area. Turn a switch on the wall to change channels, if the kitchen and seating were on the same channel then they had music in sync.

Now this was an entirely hardwired system, and there was no remote. I don't know what sonos's patents are for, but the idea was in place and the difference is do it by wireless computer.

This particular patent specifically covers a mesh network of independent playback devices that can be dynamically rearranged into possibly overlapping zones, with the volume controls being on a separate device in the local network. That's pretty far removed from a simple hard-wired two-channel audio system.

I'm opposed to software patents in general so I also think this should not be patentable, but it's hard to deny that there's a ton of engineering effort required to implement such a system and its not just a matter of adding a few lines of code to an existing audio application.

Right. I'm not clear on what the patent covers, it can be anything from too broad to very specific. My opinion changes depending on what it covers.

Is this why it’s seemingly impossible to have synced wireless audio that’s not AirPlay or Sonos?

Hopefully big G won't find a way to weasel out now that they don't have as much executive favor with the US government as they used to.

Bear in mind this case is more than just Google using some common patents: Google worked with Sonos on a collaborative project as a way to gain access to internal details of how their technology worked, and then they stole it.

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