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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Infringing on patents need not involve "copying" or "stolen technology", and shitty outlets like Inc. know their framing is BS.

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But Sonos claims Google actually did steal the technology. And the court agrees.

From the article: Back in 2013, while Google was considering how it could make its music streaming service work on Sonos' speakers, the latter company gave the search giant an inside look at its technology. At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal. Google wasn't making speakers, and it wasn't in the smart home business at all. It would be another year before it bought Nest as a way to get into the hardware business. Sonos says that as a result of that inside look, Google "blatantly and knowingly" copied its technology and included it in its own products.

The feature is about adjusting the volume of a group of speakers together. That doesn't sound like the kind of thing that you'd need to copy Sonos' source code to implement. Maybe that inside look lead Google to decide to enter the market, but I really doubt the person who wrote the speaker-group volume functionality had ever seen anything from Sonos. If they had they'd be facing copyright infringement lawsuits too.

Ultimately software patents don't really care how something is implemented, just that it has the functionality defined in the patent. So for this ruling it doesn't really matter if Google copied Sonos or not.

I think Google and Sonos had some partnership agreement in place, which makes this more complicated.

Disagreeing with the concepts of software patents doesn’t mitigate Google’s theft of them. Google knew they were stealing patented works when they did so. I don’t own any Sonos or Google products, and I’m still annoyed with Google for knowingly stealing when they could afford to pay.

There's an amazingly high number of people not reading this article, even by HN standards.

> But Sonos claims Google actually did steal the technology. And the court agrees.

Could you please point to me where you see the ITC (International Trade Commission) that you call as "court" agreeing to the specific paragraph that you posted? I am not arguing with you, just want to know this better myself.

Disc: Googler.

I mean, it seems like Inc's pretty clear in their position that Google could just pay for the technology they infringed ("The company doesn't want to pay Sonos for technology it copied") rather than backtrack on features they promised their users, and it's a point that stands pretty well on its own without even needing a long article to back it, though this certainly helps their readers with the background behind what's going on.

I'm keen on seeing whether Google ends up on the receiving end of a class action suit for disabling features that were sold to customers and then disabled after the fact.

We may never know if Google used their special insider access with Sonos to steal technology or not. But the optics certainly don’t look good.

On the contrary, we already know, and the details in the suit prove it. Sonos engineers used packet sniffing. Google copied the precise techniques Sonos uses to set up and control speakers.

That's how you're supposed to do it. The Precision Time Protocol was fully standardized before Sonos was founded specifically intended for synchronization of media streams across different systems (among other use cases). There were other similar schemes before that. This is why RTP even has a separate timestamp field when it could simply be computed from the sequence and media codec metadata.

You didn't see it much in the consumer space at the time, but the professional music production studio space had to address these concepts back in the 90s.

The techniques used are standard protocols that almost all media devices use and not some proprietary technology of Sonos.

Not true. The setup techniques are not standard protocols. Far from it.

The setup technique that is covered by one of the parents is locating the device via a wireless signal outside of the wifi network, communicating the correct wifi network information to the device and then verifying that the device has properly connected to the wifi network. This is the standard iot device setup process using Bluetooth to locate and configure devices. The patent is just on this process but on a speaker versus some other type of iot device.

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