Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwhauser | Hacker News Reader

I was mentally preparing myself to agree with Sonos on something, but apparently the patent in question is for being able to adjust the volume on a group of speakers instead of having to adjust each speaker individually. It seems ridiculous that this is patentable at all. It seems like the sort of usability feature that would take five minutes to design and perhaps get implemented before lunch. Am I missing something here?

View on HN

> Am I missing something here?

It seems there are total 5 parents. The multi zone speaker volume one is just one of them.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22871121/sonos-google-pate...

And all 5 of them are about as horrible as the speaker volume patent. For instance one covers the common iot task of joining a device to a wifi network by identifying the device initially via Bluetooth, sending the device the wifi credentials and then verifying it has joined the wifi network. The difference being the device is a speaker.

> And all 5 of them are about as horrible as the speaker volume patent.

I'm not defending any of these, but in general all Software patents are like that. Most of them are obvious solutions to the problem one is working on. It's just that one person/team works on a problem before another, comes at one of the obvious solutions and gets to file the patent.

Due to this a large number of software engineers hate software patents.

Edit: having said that, I will also refer to @samwillis's comment in this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29841653, as to why some of this may not be as obvious as it seems on first look. And, the fact that Google had partnered with Sonos (again per that comments).

I would suggest looking at the patents. They are exactly the type @samwillis says he would think are silly.

Waaay back, early in my career, I was categorically told never to read patents.

IMNAL, but per my understanding, there is a major difference between patent infringement and willful patent infringement. Which is why a soft engg should never read patents, at least not in the areas one may work at some point in their career.

Right- in the audio engineering world, this is basically a summing mixer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com