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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

For example, these changes mean you'll no longer be able to control the volume of a group of speakers. Instead, you'll have to change the volume on each individually. It also means you'll no longer be able to use the volume buttons on your phone to control a speaker group.

Not here to defend Google, but how can something trivial like that even be patentable?

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The system has not been able to define a solid test for "non-obviousness" which is one of the criteria for patentability. As a result, in my experience, approvals are based most notably on "novelty" -- If no one has seemingly done in the past, it tends to get approved.

In my opinion, that's what has gone wrong with the system, i.e., not the theoretical criteria for patentability but its execution.

If the USPTO gets to keep any part of the fees it charges, it is heavily incentivized to allow silly patents through the "non-obvious" gate. Defining "non-obvious" might be tricky, but fixing the incentives would be comparatively straightforward if they are half as broken as they appear to be.

I’m pretty sure the USPTO is not a money making venture. It’s chronically understaffed and ill equipped to deal with the volume of bullshit it receives.

USPTO is mostly self-funded. If they collect fewer fees, then their budget gets slashed. This model was introduced under Reagan.

The core problem is that for someone knowledgeable in the field, everything becomes straightforward, but the further away you are from the field, the more novel it becomes -- this is true across the board. Even the great accomplishments where people win Nobel prizes, often it can be argued that it was going to happen anyhow because it was the next step in scientific progress given the context.

Thus defining "non-obviousness" is super hard to do -- because it is all context dependent and humans are like a million monkeys inventing everything that can possibly be invented in aggregate.

And this years Nobel prize goes to ... for securing the funding to do the research

Controlling volume to a set of speakers via a remote is something we’ve been doing in the analog world for decades. So a general patent on volume control across speakers should be invalidated.

It only becomes novel due to the details of the tech. But even then you could implement the solution in various ways and I can’t imagine every potential method was patented.

So, while I agree the non-obvious can be hard to define. But with patents like this I don’t think we’ve found the right balance.

At a previous company, we had to _add code_ to our software in order to avoid violating a patent. Yes, if we just let our system do what it could, that violated a patent. We had to check for a certain condition, and disallow the generic system from doing a specific thing, in order to not get in trouble. Sorry, but that's insane.

I dealt with a manufacturing patent where you had to align certain parts off-center, because lining them up was patented. Of course it didn't really matter how you did it. Hence a subsequent patent was eventually actually awarded to someone else to manufacture them off-center. Which was far worse if you think about it. The first patent claimed a unique point. The next one claimed the entire three-dimensional volume of possible alternatives--minus that unique point.

I always want people to patent TERRIBLE ideas, to prevent game companies from implementing them.

The patent in questions covers using a controller device on a LAN which presents a UI to the user to raise, lower or mute/unmute volume which then raises, lowers or mutes/unmutes the volume across a set of speakers grouped together on the LAN. It does not cover a specific method of doing this. Any method accomplishes the above would be covered by the patent.

I feel like "using a UI that communicates over LAN", on it's own, isn't something that should be patentable for anything at this point. That's just basic network communication now. Now, if the device being communicated with did something interesting maybe there is a case on that end, but I'm not familiar enough to comment.

Seriously, how in the WORLD is this patentable. Movie theatres, stadiums, high end home AV has all had this forever.

What a trash headline too. "Google doesn't want to pay for Sonos technology"...

What innovation is this? Speaker groups - has no one used a high end AV system. Zone A Zone B etc, and you have a remote etc for all this?

It is not true that anyone knowledgeable in a field finds everything in that field straightforward. For example, Schoof's algorithm for counting points on elliptic curves was so non-obvious to relevant experts that he struggled to get his paper through peer review. Diffie also struggled to get his ideas about public-key cryptography published because experts in relevant fields did not understand how such an idea could even make sense. Another example is Gentry's original FHE construction, which was not at all obvious even to experts in lattice theory or any other relevant field of cryptography or math. It pains me to say this, but Bitcoin is also an example; check out the response on the cryptography mailing list, where several prominent experts in the field were confused by the concept of electronic payments that do not require any bank to issue and redeem the money.

Those are just what I know off the top of my head from my own field. While there is plenty of incremental research in any field and plenty of situations where a motivated expert would have arrived at the same basic concept, it is not outlandishly uncommon for a truly novel, non-obvious idea to be presented. The problem for patent examiners is that they are not experts and the pace of software innovation leaves them baffled by the applications they are examining; there are also too few patent examiners to handle the volume of applications that are submitted.

One way to address the problem is to just abolish software patents entirely. Software was never meant to be patentable, at least not if you recognize software as a form of applied math (happy to argue this one all day long) and accept the idea that math is not (or should not be) patentable.

A lot of things once explained seem obvious, but clearly weren't or they would have existed before.

I like to explain it as similar to wheels being circles. Of course that is obvious once you see a circle shaped wheel, but the insight to do that in the first place is the novelty element.

Similar advances are happening in every little niche industry and novelty implies non-obvious.

The problem is that things that are already well known and obvious are being granted patents because “but with software” gets tacked onto the end.

“Control a group of speakers” - not patentable

“Control a group of speakers, but with software” - patentable

Maybe there’s some really interesting way Sonos controls speakers with software that should be patentable. But “with software” is not novel on its own.

It's about costs, networked speakers for pro-consumers was never a thing it was just too expensive. Until it wasn't and then you obviously had to controll them together.

This is certainly the ideal scenario. But typically, they didn't exist before because they are incremental improvements based on things which didn't exist before and use technology which didn't exist before.

The claim that they are obvious is based on the fact that anyone who is involved in the production of those prior incremental steps can see what can be done as the next increment. People are working on producing wheels using molds and certain materials. Across town, someone starts selling a new kind of mold or material. The "inventor" applies it to the molding of wheels.

The difficulty is that it is really hard to claim something as obvious/non-obvious once you know about it. Basically can't determine if it is something that was incremental based on progress -or- if it just seems like that now that you know about it in hindsight.

Agree with your point though, and it may just be one of those impossible questions which is why the patent office struggles with how to make these decisions.

I'm having trouble thinking of examples of what you mean. It's not like people invent new branches of math to make a patent like with revolutionary ideas in physics. Do I get 6-12 months (or even more) working on the same problem and subject to the same constraints and available technologies the inventor had? A really "prophetic" idea can probably be identified as such because it's far too ahead of its time to get patented or used anyway.

But when it comes to money-making patents, I think of technological development as an optimization process where everyone has the same objectives and a pretty limited search area at each point in time (available technologies you can use, textbook knowledge you can draw on). I'd generally expect any smart and dedicated person working on the problem to find the next best next steps sooner or later (certainly far less than 20 years).

It is a hard idea to correlate since you can't unwind knowledge. I think your idea around giving a person X time to come up with solution could work if the patent office could afford that.

Maybe take a 3rd party who is unaware of the patent/novel idea and then asking them how to solve for some generalized version of the problem that a patent states it is solving and see what happens.

Similar to black boxing that companies will do with tech that may have been shared under restricted terms.

I've been in the same niche for years and can certainly tell you what I could and couldn't figure out. There's no magic in what I do, else only 23 year-old geniuses who think outside the box would be dominating all the patents. Even nobel prizes are on average awarded for work done at middle age.

Just do peer review and get experts' opinions. Don't tell them how to make it work, just tell them what it does. E.g. make the inventor provide a carefuully-worded abstract. By the way patents that claim the category of problem itself as the invention (as opposed to the specific method for solving the problem) are another big problem that needs to be eliminated. Those broad first claims are the ones shot down in challenges. For example "use a computer to processs transactions", or even "use a convolutional network to classify faces". These are not inventions; they are problems that still need to be solved, and it can be done many ways.

Anyway if you're uncertain about 6-months, how can you justify giving them 20 years of monopoly?

I think the test is simple:

give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent and not how the patent implements the claim.

If the experts can find a way to implement the claim in a relatively short period, then the claim is obvious and should be rejected.

Of course it is possible that a more specific claim is not obvisous. For example, if there are specific performance requirements. If the initial claims are obvisious, the inventor can try again with more narrow claims.

Another requirement that is sorely needed is that an expert in the field can actually understand the patent in a reasonable period of time.

This is actually a FANTASTIC idea!

that's not really going to work though.. there have been (and must still be) tons of "obvious" solutions to well-known problems..

So if you could simply "give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent" and have them actually come up with something.. Well, then it'd be trivial to simply rewrite existing unsolved problems in "claim of method to solve problem" and they'd magically be able to solve it?

The problem is that obvious solutions become obvious only when they arrive, and not before.

Even framing a problem so that it can be solved is an example of this.. There are lots of problems that only appear after their solution. Before the solution, they weren't problems, but simply "how things are". Like, right now, we've not solved death, so for most people, it's not really a problem, it's just how things are.. If we solve death, future people will look back at us in disbelief: (You try to tell me people just DIED? and the entire world didn't unite to fix that? what the fuck was wrong with them? guess they got what they deserved..)

I'm just saying, that if your claims have obvious solutions, then the community has no need for your patent. The patent has to solve something that is not obvious.

For the community, it is only worth granting a patent if the community gets something back in return. And that is, solving a problem we don't know how to solve. Obviously, that can be with efficiency parameters. If the simple solution is 50% efficient and the patent claims 90%. That may be worth the patent. And everybody else can keep using the 50% efficient solution.

In your example, if you now come up with a patent that solves death, then no expert will be able to find a solution in reasonable period.

If you can then show a working version that solves death, even if it is completely obvious in retrospect, it is worth a patent.

I like this idea, but the pro-patent argument says that some things become obvious only after you see them. Once a company starts selling a product with the new idea, everyone will figure it out, and it will become part of the set of things that are obvious to experts.

In my opinion that's not what patents are about. Patents are about how to do something. The obvious purpose is that revealing your patent advances the state of the art.

Otherwise, why would the community grant a relatively long term (about 20 years) of monopoly? It doesn't make sense to do that just for a clever business idea.

I basically agree with you. The counterargument says that some innovation simply doesn't happen for centuries, until it finally occurs to someone. You want to incentivize those kinds of innovations as well, to get people to revisit old issues. For example, the stirrup. Evident once you see it, but a big innovation, or it would have shown up centuries earlier.

Yes--basically a tech like Bluetooth will come out and then a bunch of dumb patents will come out for 'controlling a microwave with bluetooth' and 'controlling refrigerator with bluetooth' and the patent will be approved even though they are completely obvious and the exact same thing.

Also, what exactly do these patents cover? Every wired stereo I’ve seen had a volume control that changed the volume on all speakers. I’m sure such systems were already common half a century ago.

From my reading of the patent, it's not that the concept of speaker groupings was patented. Rather, a specific UI for showing and modifying the groupings and adjusting the volume. Unfortunately, there aren't many different ways to represent groupings in a UI.

UI to do that seems awfully basic.

Isn't simplicity the definition of a good UI? And even if it looks easy, it can be very hard to make something that is simple.

My concern is that someone can “own” that.

Doesn't regular volume slider controls multiple remote speakers in case of connected Bluetooth headphones?

Depends on whether you consider a pair of bluetooth headphones as a single device or multiple devices.

I'm unaware of many devices that output audio to multiple distinct bluetooth targets simultaneously. Bose have that feature as part of their app, but I don't think it's a standard thing as a rule.

Airpods and clones thereof?

What do you mean you are unaware of devices that output audio to distinct bluetooth targets? Any Windows PC can do that, AFAIU. Just connect multiple devices, and every program is free to choose which of them to output to.

Every windows PC, every android, and even things like Pi OS/linux kernel can push to multiple distinct bluetooth targets simultaneously. For android I think it's going on 7 years of that

Again, it’s not the controlling of the speakers that was patented, it was the UI for grouping them and controlling them. Bluetooth headphones generally have the same controls as normal headphones, so they wouldn’t apply to this patent.

This is incorrect. The patent doesn't cover any specific UI. Part of what the patent covers is a controller on a network presenting a UI to control volume on a group of speakers not a specific implementation of the UI.

There were a number of patents in question. I'm specifically referring to this one: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en

Here is the abstract, you can see that it clearly is about the interface of creating and controlling the play group:

> A multimedia controller including a processor, the controller configured to: provide a user interface for a player group, wherein the player group includes a plurality of players in a local area network, and wherein each player is configured to playback a multimedia output from a multimedia source; accept an input to facilitate formation of the player group, indicating that at least two of the players in the local area network are to be included in the player group; for each of the plurality of players within the player group, accept an input to adjust a volume associated with the player, that causes the player to adjust its volume; and accept an input to adjust a volume associated with the player group, wherein the input to adjust the volume associated with the group causes the players in the player group to adjust their volumes.

> This application is a Continuation of U.S. Ser. No. 12/035,112, entitled “User Interfaces For Controlling And Manipulating Groupings In A Multi-Zone Media System”

You need to read the claims in the patent. That is what the patent actually covers. The claims include the controller presenting a UI but that is not the only claim in the patent. Besides that the abstract also supports the point of my post and not your original. You stated that the patent covers a particular presentation of a UI for doing so. It does not. It just states that a UI is presented and not the form of the UI which is exactly what I stated in my comment.

The claims almost all say "via the user interface." (Not a user interface btw) The figures also contain detailed descriptions of the user interface. I know it's a trope that software patents are bad, but a generally broad patent of "controller for controlling" could have been challenged. The user interface was the main issue with this.

That seems much more like an idea than an invention to me.

That’s all an invention really is. At least according to the patent office.

Here’s another example. Wouldn’t it be neat if the tree control in your file browser could have an icon that represents more than 1 file. That idea may or may not have much value. But you better not implement that idea because IBM has a patent on it.

Patents in software rarely meet the bar that most people have of inventions.

unfortunately, the legitimacy of a patent is only determined by contention.

the simple elegance of the following has been lost:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Kinda crappy but i'm sure google has tons of patents on things we would find trivial as well, as far as i'm concerned, let shitty mega corps duke it out.

That's also a feedback loop though, that exists in part specifically because of how easy and common patent trolling has been. They have to have patents over stupid trivial things because if they don't register these someone else will, and then suddenly it's an even bigger waste of time and money for everyone involved.

There's a reason orgs like the Alliance for Open Media -- a Google-led initiative -- use licensing that explicitly grants you use of the patents owned by member orgs, but also explicitly revoke those if you sue any of them over a patent claim.

> They have to have patents over stupid trivial things because if they don't register these someone else will, and then suddenly it's an even bigger waste of time and money for everyone involved.

It also works as a way to keep incumbents in power. Say Google has 100 important mobile OS patents and Apple has 100 important mobile OS patents. It makes sense for them to cross-license. But a new mobile OS entrant has nothing of interest to Google or Apple and so no way to get access to those important patents.

> let shitty mega corps duke it out

The problem with that is that we the customers end up as collateral damage.

i've begun to believe that customers have no power in first place. The most recent example being how youtube just came in and removed the dislike count, and no one could do anything, not only that i bet youtube usage hasn't gone down. These big companies are so entrenched in our minds at this point that they could essentially do whatever and get away with it.

Again, Customers being advertisers and content producers have some power. You dont.

Exactly. Case in point: Sonos not getting along with Google means the Youtube Music app doesn't allow casting to a Sonos speaker directly (like the Spotify app for example). This means I have to use the Sonos app, which "wraps" the Youtube API, but in a very shitty way (there's lots of contents that I can easily find if I search for it on Youtube directly, but the same search string gives no or bad results if searched in the Sonos app). Not sure if this is just a poor implementation of the YT API by Sonos or more bad will on Google's part (I'm inclined to think it's the first), but either way the user experience is horrible. It's so bad that the Sonos speaker basically sits there unused (even though the sound quality is very good).

I'm not taking Sonos' part here though: like other people here pointed out, I'm pretty sure they patented some very obvious things which they should imo never have gotten a patent for in the first place.

edited to add this link for reference: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/12/10/the-forced-switch-t...

Not all companies have an aggressive patent strategy. Historically, I believe Google felt negatively about software patents, and had fewer than other tech companies. Eventually they bought a large portfolio of patents (e.g. through the Motorola acquisition; when they later sold Motorola, they kept the patents) so that they could use them defensively, because not having enough patents became a liability.

Even after that, I believe Google only used their patents defensively: they'd only sue company X for patent violations if company X sued Google for patent violations. When I worked there, that was the impression the company gave off, and some initiatives like "Alliance for Open Media" the other commenter mentioned are in line with that.

I don't think Google is unique in this: older tech companies seem to have more aggressive patent strategies, whereas newer (.com era and onward) seem to dislike software patents but are forced to play the game by more aggressive companies and patent trolls. It's a drag on the industry IMO.

The biggest losers are newer and smaller companies, who haven't had enough time or resources to build up a defensive patent portfolio.

Young companies typically aren’t aggressive on their patents because they are seeking growth. When their growth stalls out that’s when a shift to monetizing their patents occur.

I’m starting to understand the capitalism is cancer arguments. Infinite growth is unsustainable. So inevitably companies that were once great need to use tactics like this to continue their infinite growth trajectory.

Young companies with 'great patents' will leverage them both offensively and defensively if it makes sense to do that.

Sonos, in this case, is 'kind of' a younger company. They're not making huge profits and 'free cash flow from a giant' would be huge for them.

Mostly, patents are used defensively, so that companies big and small, don't get sued by trolls or steamrolled.

I think Sonos proves my point. My understanding is that their growth has stalled out. So, that's why they are shifting to patent licensing. And maybe to your point that's fair assuming their patents are truly innovative inventions that Google is unfairly using.

> they'd only sue company X for patent violations if company X sued Google for patent violations.

That's still a problem. Suppose company X has a real innovation that is worth billions of dollars and google sues them using "bogus" patents? Most patents suck, but there are some that actually cover real innovation.

> Suppose company X has a real innovation that is worth billions of dollars and google sues them using "bogus" patents?

Bogus patents will be dismissed, eventually. Going to court means commiting to a multiyear-process with no clear outcome if the other party has a hefty patent portfolio (regardless of how you characterize them). The process is quicker and more painful against those without defense,as Google learned when Apple decided to go "Thermonuclear" with patents.

VP9/AV1 patent would be good example.

Google patented swapping out the entropy coder in a video codec, which is already a generic swappable module in practically every codec, for another they didn't invent, arithmetic coding.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...

Did Google use that patent offensively? Google takes on a lot of patents, but they don't attack people with the patents, that was the statement.

As far as I know Google are very open that they never use their patents offensively, they just have them as a defence against other companies attacking them with patents. I think that is still true today, can't find any articles about Google suing companies over patents without being sued first.

Now that Googles founders are no longer leading the company that might change, but so far their "do not be evil" still lives on in this regard, at least it did a few years ago.

The patent office hands them out like candy... "Rounded corners" anyone?

The "rounded corners" narrative needs to die.

It wasn't just rounded corners. It was a combination of design features for a specific device that, among other things, included rounded corners.

Still way too broad...

If it covers even a dozen different trivial choices then the end result is extremely narrow.

My car looks like a sports car. Not just one corner rounded but look at all the aspects. Only I shall be able to make sports cars. I patented it. /s

Looks like a sports car isn’t a specific design. Compare a Bugatti Veyron with a 911 Turbo. They both have lot’s of rounded edges but somehow they are very easy to tell apart as are every brand of hyper car on the market.

This wasn’t two companies that happened to come up with the same design, this was just blatant copying of pointless aesthetic details, which is illegal.

> They both have lot’s of rounded edges but somehow they are very easy to tell apart as are every brand of hyper car on the market.

Which is very relevant in this case as in the court Samsung's lawyer couldn't tell iPad and Galaxy Tab apart from 10 feet away: https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/14/samsung_lawyer_co...

I don't want to get into this old issue but I just noticed that all my notebooks are rectangular with sharp corners regardless of the manufacturer. I mean paper notebooks. It would be silly to patent and sue for that and with the hindsight of 11+ years that was a silly design patent to award. My Samsung from 2019 has rounded corners. I can't even remember how it ended except that some lawyers made a zillion of money out of it.

Whether it's appropriate to use sharp or rounder corners for a given tool is common knowledge dating back thousands of years. In this case it's based on grip, handling, taking it out of a pocket, not piercing that pocket, coexisting with other items in bag, etc.

It was actually the specific curve used that was at issue, but behind that phone designs are not limited to 4 rounded off corners or sharp edges.

Take say the blackberry bold 9930 it’s bottom is a single curve from edge to edge without any flat parts. Considering these phones had a single button at the bottom a curve like that would have simply saved material without compromising screen size and better fit into peoples hands. There are actually a host of odd ruggedized smartphones like: https://www.catphones.com/en-us/cat-s48c-smartphone/ Even for laptops you get a lot of odd edges look at the HP’s Omen X 2S.

Don’t want any of those looks? It’s fine there where plenty of other things they could have done to differentiate these phones like say volume buttons next to the center one, or a back button for web pages etc. It’s only when you copy everything that it’s no longer your style it’s Apple’s.

Net result in the US: The jury trial for damages concluded on May 24, 2018, awarding Apple $539 million, which includes $399 million for damages of Samsung's products sold that infringed on the patents. Germany acted much faster and simply blocked Galaxy 10.1 sales.

That’s because the platonic ideal for a tablet is basically a thin plate of glass with rounded corners.

Hell, even my kindle basically looks like this. My TV looks like this except for the rounded corners (which it doesn’t need because it’s not intended to be held).

Really or is that just what you’re used to? Many people buy cases with corners that protrude thus protecting those flat panels from drops. If anything that seems closer to an ideal design, let alone looking at the ergonomics of how to hold a tablet.

IMO, these designs seem geared to upselling cases rather than anything approaching an ideal.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s approaching the ideal form. It makes complete sense that a device which is at its core just a screen, trends toward being literally nothing but a screen over time. You see the same with other items, including kindles, but also actual books, newspapers, magazines. These are all 100% content edge to edge with the exception of a margin to grip the thing. In 2nd grade we had individual chalk boards and they were literally the shape of an iPad.

The ability to throw a case on it is a feature, not a misdesign. I don’t want a bulky tablet to protect the corners. I’ll put a case on it for that. I happen to not want that so I have a very minimal case on all my devices.

A case over a tablet/phone is always significantly larger and heavier than the equivalent protection built into the device because the case needs attachment points and inherent structural rigidity. It’s not about design just physics.

Every version of the current base/mini/pro model iPad actually has quite a wide bezel in part because people lose so much of the front screen to their cases/hands. https://www.apple.com/ipad-10.2/ You simply can’t comfortably cup them the way you can a phone.

Sure. My case is not larger or heavier than the protection that others might want, though. My kid’s iPad from school is bulky and heavy from the case. Personal iPads in my house are barely heavier than without the cases.

Bezels are wide to accommodate hands, though, not cases. Good cases can obscure nearly none of the bezel.

My case is not larger or heavier than the protection others might want.

An integrated 5-10 grams on a 487 gram iPad could give you a lot of protection. That’s about the point where they should survive a 4 foot drop onto wood/tile/concrete from any angle. I am not saying that’s going to prevent everyone from buying a case, but if close to 80% of the market is buying a case perhaps they could simply make something people would be less concerned about.

Maybe? I’ve never bought a tablet that I didn’t intend to go in a bag, so I want a cover anyway. I don’t see that integrated bumpers do much for me.

I am confused, what thin and light protection case can you get other than just bumpers? And what is it protecting your iPad inside a bag from?

I am not saying your wrong, it’s just I don’t understand your point.

My current iPad cover is thin plastic with a “smart cover”. It’s not a bumper. It’s also certainly heavier than 10 grams but still quite light.

It protects from scratches and very light falls, such as being bumped off a table. A drop from chest height would be iffy.

> That’s because the platonic ideal for a tablet is basically a thin plate of glass with rounded corners.

Is it? What about non-rounded corners?

Sharp corners are uncomfortable to hold.

> My car looks like a sports car.

You will then be surprised that car manufacturers often engage in court battles against Chinese knock-offs.

Apple owned the concept of a portable screen with round corners and a grid of colored icons.

They had to restrict the icons into colored because there was prior art for B&W. The entire thing is a farce.

LG Prada KE850 rounded corners, capacitive screen, colored icons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdt2wYAB1jY

Ok, one that doesn't have a grid of icons. Are you claiming it's prior art?

I don't think there has been prior art, once you consider all the irrelevant details. There very likely isn't, because if there was, Samsung would have used it.

Wasn't that a design patent, which is closer to a trademark than an actual patent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

Well it obviously didn't hold up.

IMO Apple had a copyright, maybe, it shouldn't have been patentable though. Design != technology so shouldn't be patentable.

That’s why it’s a design patent, which is completely different concept from an invention patent.

For one, it lasts forever.

The argument I see often is things like this seem trivial after the fact.

But isn't that what computers are supposed to be for; networking and connecting devices so that one can control them easily?

Yes, but is the patent about concept or specific tecnical solution? If it is about the concept, it blows my mind…

One-click buy was a patent so…

And Amazon paid a number of talking heads and tech luminaries to help them with the blowback they were getting at the time for such a trivial patent. Scumbags, all.

It's not about the concept, it's about the specific UI they used to do it. However, there are not many ways to represent the concept in a UI, which is where Google is running into a problem.

It's true that genuine advances often seem trivial after the fact, and it can sometimes be hard to distinguish them. In this case, having one volume control multiple connected speakers is how wired stereos have worked for many decades, so while it might have been state of the art in the 1930s, Sonos wasn't involved.

Look, everyone on this website is going to agree with you that the patents are pretty silly. But that doesn't change the two central facts of the article,

1. Sonos holds such patents

2. Google (the trillion dollar company) is actively making its products worse for users instead of licensing said patents. These are not free products like GMail, these are products that people have paid for, and these are not trivial features, these are features that were actively marketed for the product.

Perhaps we could discuss this, the actually interesting topic, instead of the same boring discussion about the broken US patent system again and again.

Don't feed the [patent] trolls. I used this feature, and will miss it, but would rather Google not give in to abuse of the patent system.

On the otherhand, I will no longer consider Sonos products. Be better Sonos. Bluesound seems like the better alternative that is pushing for innovation over pure profit.

The time to stop discussing the broken patent system is when it is no longer broken. That time is not now.

I bet there’s even a patent for “adjust volumes dynamically per speaker based on real-time positional data to increase volume in a balanced way when possible”. If not, I claim this post demonstrates it’s an obvious thing to implement, so long as the user has their phone or another device equipped with mics on them.

Sonos does part of this: when you set up the speaker it sends out pings that are picked up by your phone which you have to wave around like you're doing a cleansing ceremony. To my knowledge it doesn't do this dynamically.

They have quote-unquote "Automatic Trueplay™" for the mobile speakers (Move and Roam), which they say "automatically re-tunes as you play new content and bring your Sonos product to different locations."

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/3569?language=en_US

using volume buttons to control volume... I don't even... why didn't they just grant Sonos a patent on buttons?

Amazon had one click buying patented for a long time. It should have expired by now but I don't know whether there's any mechanism to extend it.

I've had BlueSound wireless hifi speakers for some time. Originally the control app was also capable of adjusting speaker volume with the volume buttons on your phone, which I quite enjoyed. It was deprecated (along with the ability to play your iPhone's music library over wifi.. à la airplay) several years ago, presumably due to patent/licensing issues.

No-one remember the Amazon one-click buy patent? [1] A lot of people weren't very happy about it [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click

[2] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/patent_archive....

Huh, I had noticed that my sonos setup did that and wondered why other systems hadn't gotten around to it.

Yes. That's how it works. 99% of all inventions are "obvious" once you understand how they work - but before that no one can imagine it.

If "buy" buttons can be patented, pretty much anything can be.

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