US jury says Google owes Sonos $32.5M in smart-speaker patent case | Hacker News Reader

US jury says Google owes Sonos $32.5M in smart-speaker patent case

reuters.com

99 pointsfidotron79 comments

How does anyone start a company these days and not accidentally infringe on a bunch of nonsense patents?

You license the patents as applicable, if that's an option. Otherwise, you go and make+patent your own invention. Maybe have a good legal team to research patents too.

The problem is companies can just ignore your request to license a patent. Did you know the reason any artist can "cover" another artist's song is that Congress added "compulsory licensing" to copyright law? For 9.1 cents per copy of a song, you can record your own version and sell it. We need to do the same thing for patent claims. Set a floor of, IDK, $100 per copy of a patent claim infringement. As it is now, damages are completely, un-capped and you have to pay for a lawsuit to get a jury to decide how much a patent is worth.

Cap total proceeds at 20% of final product cost after a few years of exclusivity.

This is far less than nonsense: Google partnered with Sonos explicitly to get access to their internal designs, and then copied them. This is closer to industrial espionage than inadvertently stumbling across patent infringement.

> Google partnered with Sonos explicitly to get access to their internal designs, and then copied them

If anything this ought to be strong evidence that the patents failed to disclose the invention and are invalid. Patents are a deal where you publicly disclose your invention in exchange for a temporary monopoly. If someone has to get access to your internal designs to copy them, they shouldn't be protected by patent.

Edit: (Note I'm talking about how the law ought to work, I'm not claiming this is strong evidence under current US law that the patents actually are invalid)

A patent is at best a recipe, and expertise on how to make the stuff work best in the real world is still extremely valuable.

A recipe isn't patentable on its own, though. For most inventions you either need to demonstrate you have already built the thing, or have provided the thing to the PTO along with the application. For software, though, it seems you don't need to do either.

While it's true that Google partnered with Sonos and then copied the features they saw Sonos having success with I'm not aware of any allegations they used internal Sonos documents.

If that happened I'm surprised that no case summaries mentioned this anywhere!

Can you link to this?

If they were proper partners I would think they would be working together using Google's money along with Sonos patents as a team without needing to license the patent except to those other than the partnership.

I'm not very well informed but it looks like Google was simply an untrustworthy partner and they split up unamicably.

Especially in the audio/video world this is close to impossible. It's a patent minefield

This was (AIUI) the reason that google disabled the ability to adjust cast content volume via the volume rocker from their Android phones. Interestingly, I noticed that this feature had returned recently in at least one non-Google apps.

Earlier, when I made the comment above, I tried it with YouTube, and it did not work. Now it works. This could be a bug rather than a change in policy.

For all the haters: actually, it's tricky technology and even Sonos struggles to change volume simultaneously when you have 4+ speakers. WiFi is a big pain.

(That said, Sonos UI is unnecessarily bad, they have terrible support for playing local files and as a consumer I want more competition)

Google made a workaround that uses a different technology. And Sonos still got it blocked.

'When news of the patent decision broke, Google told The Verge it had gotten non-infringing designs approved by the ITC. Sonos warned, however, that Google might have to “degrade or eliminate product features” to be compliant, and that certainly seems to be what’s happening. '

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22871304/google-home-speak...

They somehow patented a common sense feature of managing the volume multiple speakers at the same time.

They probably used some loophole of volume of "smart" speaker or something.

If it were common google would have used prior art as a defense.

They said “common sense” not commonly available. IMO it’s similar to the dot-com boom era of patents that do “normal thing, but on the /web/“.

I feel like it's just in an unfortunate valley of being slightly too techy, not quite old fashioned enough (e.g. if its that bad I'd add a backup radio), and too expensive (the most prolific user of Sonos products I've met bought probably 15 of them and would've had no qualms spending hundreds on the one that just outputs a signal with no speaker) for there to be much pressure to get it right architecturally.

The 2 patents (10,848,885 and 10,469,966) aren't about the technicalities of changing volume simultaneously, they are about the way the zone profiles are updated, configured, and stored so you can refer to them as groups to perform the action on in the first place. From an implementation perspective, the only thing in question here is needing to signal you want to send the volume change control to each device instead of ones in the bedroom. It's unrelated to how you accomplish implementing the change, close in time, across the devices (which are already streaming the music close in time anyways).

Such a dumb lawsuit for stupid patents that should never have been granted in the first place awarding money of literally no consequence to either company and taking away features from users along the way.

This lawsuit could be the spokesperson for the worst of tech patents.

What changes would you propose to the system, or do you think we don’t need it at all to help reward development (and in this case, collaboration with a quasi-competitor)?

In fact the winner take all / must become a unicorn approach to startups here is probably driven in large part by our inability to block competition from copying ideas. A good thing?

No one getting anything good because one company patented an obvious idea and then AT&T'ed it would be even worse.

The solution to monopoly is antitrust law not patent law making more monopolies.

Good point. But still room for improvement on other end imho. Only way to succeed in some of these spaces is rapid growth at loss via massive venture funding. Doesn’t seem healthy.

Do you know why musicians are allowed to "cover" any song they like? It is because Congress decided music is so important no one artists should be able to lock it up for themselves so they passed a law for "compulsory licensing" of copyrighted music. We need to do the same for patents. The compulsory license for a recorded song is 9.1 cents per song, Set some fee per patent claim.

I didn’t know this was a thing! Fascinating. It doesn’t seem like the economics always work similarly though. It’s fairly easy for millions of dollars of R&D to be put into a single invention, for it to be worth millions/billions on the market, and for someone else to copy it identically.

I.e. presumably Congress wouldn’t protect someone literally stripping the name off someone else’s song and publishing it and earning money from it?

Fee per patent claim is definitely interesting, just pricing it seems harder than in the song case.

No, I can't republish a song and call it mine, and I can't use someone else's recording of a song without their permission. What I can do is record my version of their song and sell it and I can publicly play their song and charge people - but I have to cut them author of the song in for 9.1 cents for each instance.

Yeah, devil is in the details. Currently a patent gives exclusive use for 20 years and music copyright gives control for 100 years, but anyone can license it. The trick is to strike a balance that gets the most economic benefit. Set the claim fee high at first and tinker with it. I would think companies that innovate would be happy to know there is a ceiling to their liabilities instead of being at the mercy of a jury. And do we really want an inventor to be able to lock up any use of a technology for 20 years. Imagine a solo inventor cracks low-temperature fusion and sells their patent to Saudi Arabia for $1B - who sits on it for 20 years and sues anyone who tries to use it. Here is the public framing: "We need to pass the 'Freedom to Innovate' act passed to stop evil foreign companies from locking up American inventions that would benefit all hard-working Americans!"

Music is not as easy as it seems. How much should an artist get for a ring tone? For a stream? How much should artists get paid for longer songs? There is a 3 judge panel that adjudicates all these things: https://www.crb.gov/index.html

Your nightmare scenario actually sounds pretty good to me. Solo inventor is forced to publish the details of how to crack a 50-year-old problem, and even if the guy is a complete dick (refusing to license) and the rest of the world can't figure out a way to engineer around the patent claims, the world gets the technology a measly 20 years later. Many fields don't advance very much in 20 years - computers are the recent exception to this, but as the field matures, innovation will slow down (see what happened with Moore's law).

Said solo inventor gets rich and (in)famous in the process, but this is a person who solved a problem that the world has been working on for the last 50 years with no significant indications of progress, so maybe that inventor deserves to get rich and famous for coming up with the solution.

In contrast, without the $1 billion pot of gold sitting at the end of the rainbow for the solo inventor, there is a very good chance that person would never have tried to innovate on something like low-temperature fusion, and if they did, the details would be kept under lock and key rather than disclosed. The existence of the patent system both provides the incentive for someone who isn't a megacorp to innovate, and forces disclosure.

With my proposal there is still the exact same $1B pot of gold for the inventor, the difference is everyone gets the benefit of their invention now. The trick is to set the claim license fee so that the value of the patent is exactly equal to the value of a current patent.

Great, now figure out how to discern the value of a patent without negotiating it. Also, for many patents (drugs, for example), a lot of the value comes from the exclusivity of it, and losing that also decimates the value of the patent.

This isn't copyright where 100000 plays of someone's cover is worth $1 and doesn't hurt the original artist at all. This is a hundred million dollar asset offering exclusive access to a competitive product. This is fundamentally different.

> a lot of the value comes from the exclusivity of it

I think you are confusing value and price. Auctions precisely determine something's value. Companies sometimes can use scarcity to capture more money in price than they deliver in value - but that is a bug in our economic system, not a desired feature

Implied in your comment is that scarcity does not confer value, which is just not true. Scarcity, particularly when controlled by one entity, creates tremendous value for that entity because it creates a power imbalance with other entities. Otherwise, the secret coca-cola formula would have no reason to stay secret. Patents actually get their entire value from the artificial scarcity they create - you don't need a patent to confer an invention to someone else, only to stop other people from using it. Scarcity also greatly improves your ability to capture value, but it creates value to be in the club.

Another possible misunderstanding you may have about the concept of "value" is that you may be conflating value (in general) with societal value. One is a subset of the other - you can get value, companies can get value, and society can get value. People and companies can get a lot of value out of things that are not directly valuable to society, and society tolerates these things because society, on the whole, gets more value from having those people and companies in it than not. This is why you can drink, and also why most countries have patent systems despite that patent owners may not make optimal societal use of their patents during the term of their limited monopoly.

Also, if you have ever sold a patent before, you will know that it frequently takes the form of an auction process. Even if not explicitly structured as an auction, these negotiations have auction-like qualities with buyers bidding against each other and actually a lot of information-sharing.

So you are saying price==value? That is not true. The price a company extracts from a customer is de-coupled from the value a customer receives.

If I walk into a store to buy a shirt I saw online only to discover it is on sale for 20% off, I am getting the exact same value as buying it online, but the company captured less of the value they delivered.

If there is one shirt left in the store and the store holds an auction for it that I win for a price 20% higher, again I get the exact same value, but the store captured 20% more of the value.

The goal of any sane economy should be to deliver the most value to the people in it - including the people who own companies.

Basic economics can tell you that "price <= value to customer" is a relationship that holds pretty damn strongly. Price isn't decoupled from value, it is derived from value. I am just saying that the actual customer (not some nebulous notion of society) derives value from the scarcity.

Like it or not, people often get value from scarce things, usually in the form of power (or status for other kinds of goods). In a system with compulsory licenses for everyone who wants them, that power is gone, and so is the value related to it.

> The goal of any sane economy should be to deliver the most value to the people in it - including the people who own companies.

Which is why every economy today has a strong patent system with monopolistic rights. It is a very good way to deliver value to inventors and small technology business owners while encouraging disclosure, and a good incentive for them, in turn, to contribute to the wider body of societal knowledge. A system with mandatory non-scarce licenses would not do this - we would end up with more "coke formulas" and fewer papers.

Now I understand what you are saying. The only way I see individuals deriving value from scarcity is with brands - not functional patents. Even with technical luxury goods like watches and cars, which may also include patents, the real customer scarcity value comes from showing others they are rich enough to buy and flaunt those goods. Can you think of an example where something purely functional is only valuable because it is scarce? Maybe private jets? If jets dropped in price 50x, private airports would become crowded and destroy much of their benefit. But then the gating luxury good would switch to being a member of a private airport network or something.

I am talking about a change to patents, not copyright and trademarks which are exclusive essentially forever. You can still strut around with a $20k Birkin bag (If they deem you a worthy buyer of course) that delivers the same functionality as a $100 purse. No one will be allowed to make fake Birkins and destroy their exclusivity. But if Hermes patents some new zipper, you would be able to duplicate their zipper and pay them a license fee. You would NOT be allowed to mention their brand. Patents are about function, not color, size, style or ornamentation.

Individuals don't derive value from scarcity of inventions, which is why individuals don't buy patents.

Companies do derive value from that scarcity. Companies derive value from a lot of things that don't pass along to the customer, which is why companies engage in marketing and buy business insurance, for example. Both of these add $0 of value for the end customer, but they have value to the company. Patents are the same. You can't discount the value to the company in your economic calculation here, because the companies are the ones who are actually buying/licensing the patent!

When you think about patent-based tech transfer, there are two parts of that transfer which you can actually value separately:

1. The invention itself - a new widget or process that does something cool/useful for the customers or makes the company more efficient

2. The patent - a property right that allows the company to exclude other people from using the invention for 20 years

End customers/users only get value from #1. Regardless of whether the patent is for nuclear fusion or changing the volume on a speaker setup, they get $0 of value from #2. The same is true of trademarks and copyrights, by the way, they have $0 of value to the consumer.

Your hypothetical change in patents would work perfectly if you assume that all of the value of the patent is encapsulated in #1, and is a way to price that. It completely discounts #2. #2 is actually where most of the value in high-value patent portfolios comes from.

Your nuclear fusion hypothetical is the same: the energy companies likely get O($100 million) or less of value from the technology itself (thanks to how commodity markets work - efficiencies basically get passed on to the consumers), but tens of billions of dollars of value in terms of their ability to expand market share into markets where it is cost-effective to use and their competitors can't use it. The exclusive right to use the technology is what enables the company to capture value there.

By the way, the main enforcement mechanism today against lookalikes of those Birkin bags is a design patent (US D656,313), not a trademark. In about 3 years, that patent will expire, and you will see trademark-non-infringing similar-looking bags popping up a lot more. Under your hypothetical, someone looking to make a similar bag would just have to pay them a license fee (and of course, don't mention the brand or the word "Birkin" and make sure to change up one of the trademarked features - see trademark no. 76700120), and the lookalikes would be 100% okay.

Thanks for sticking with me and engaging.

I agree that design patents should not have a compulsory license. Interesting that Birkins patent expires in 3 years. I will set a calendar reminder to look into knocking them off in a couple years :)

I appreciate your thoughtful disagreement with my assertion that it is possible to set a compulsory license fee that would be "value neutral" between patents as issued today, and patents with a compulsory license. I think there is something that could be done to reform patents along these lines, but it is a harder argument to make and that argument DOES start going into the "value to society" area and is therefore purely political.

That doesn't really solve the problem of patent trolls taking money from other companies.

A covered song is actually a specific lyric, not "a song about love in which the party of the first part expresses admiration for the part in the second part"

Currently, in trade for publicly disclosing how their invention works, we give patent holders an exclusive right to make, sell, or use their invention for 20 years. A patent holder can say no one other than me can use my invention for 20 years. I think inventions are more important than songs, yet Congress decided there must be some way to force the author of a song to allow anyone to play that song - and we will decide how much you get in compensation. I am saying we do the same thing for inventions. Don't like the deal? You are free to keep your invention secret. The formula for Coke is a classic example of how they chose to protect their invention.

Some types of inventions are easier to keep secret than others. And some, like drugs, probably legally have to disclose ingredient in order to sell them. But, in general, I'm not sure we really want a system where companies are incentivized to either just not pursue certain avenues of research given the results will just be copied or to take steps to make it harder to reverse engineer devices.

I agree patent trolls are a problem. And I agree we want to incentivize people to innovate. I am citing an example with copyright how Congress chose to strike a balance and I think it could be applied to patents.

I have several patents that were issued to both large companies and start-ups. The patent system right now only works for large companies and is actively stopping innovation by small companies. What changes do you think would help?

Breadth of patents is the most obvious issue--though it's somewhat understandable scope creep given that mechanical inventions are probably not as central as they once were. But any system of IP protection is always going to favor the entities who can afford good lawyers and pursue enforcement claims. A system where those same large entities can swoop in and copy anything they want is not obviously better.

That really is not a lot tbh

Both sides may have spent a substantial fraction of that in attorneys' fees.

$2.30 per device.

They can make it more if they tell Google to either recall all their patent-infringing devices, or pay them more for a license.

Patents allow you to do that. A patent is a temporary monopoly on a technology, after all.

It’s not as temporary as one would believe and was intended, especially in today’s environment where for all practical purposes it is irrelevant when a patent runs out when the technology itself is obsolete long before the patent even gets close to expiring, if it’s not effectively extended by several methods.

Patent duration today should maybe be measured in a function of the value it has produced measured in something relatively fixed like gold. It would be relative to the impact and would also throttle regulatory and market capture and wealth imbalances.

The current parent duration based on the celestial orbits around the closest star is dumb and blunt. My proposal would accelerate technology dissemination and prevent many of the overburden issues.

Google removed this from their software many years ago.

They eventually cancelled chromecast audio altogether, probably at least partly due to this.

They'd still have to pay a patent license after paying the damages.

Edit: though it says they're trying to work around the patents left in the case, so perhaps not.

Ahh ok, but it the 32m would be past license fees and damages, right?

Unfortunately the article provides no detail on what's infringing.

Google had a feature within the Home app that allowed users to change the volume of groups of speakers simultaneously, which infringed on a Sonos patent.

How is that a patent… wtf… I hope Google appeals and gets the patent thrown out.

It might be the mechanism rather than the outcome? It is hard to say anything in these cases without doing patent lawyer work.

615, [1] 033, [2] 885, [3] and 966. [4] These were the patents listed in the case [5] if you want to quickly look at them. I am just linking them to save someone else from having to search for how to find them. The jury decided on 885 and 966. [6]

The quote below is from the source for [5]

> Whereas the '615 and '033 patents cover technology related to transferring playback between devices, i.e., “casting,” the '885 and '966 patents cover technology related to managing groups of smart speakers.

> Pursuant to “patent showdown” procedure, each side has already moved for summary judgment on a single claim. Separate orders granted summary judgment in favor of Google on invalidity of claim 13 of the '615 patent and in favor of Sonos on infringement of claim 1 of the '885 patent. Sonos has since withdrawn its remaining claims based on the '615 patent, and Google has since begun developing and deploying a purported design-around for the '885 and '966 patents. Claims and defenses related to the '033, '885, and '966 patents are now set for trial starting May 8, 2023

[1] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

[2] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

[3] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

[4] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

[5] https://casetext.com/case/sonos-inc-v-google-llc-7

[6] https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/egpbyxmqdvq/...

Wow. What a patent-worthy invention that is far from non-obvious.

I mean, considering it was patented in 2004, you know one year after 802.11g came into the world...I kinda think yeah it's ok?

The patent expires in less than a year for context of how old it is.

Man I really dislike Google but this is not patent worthy. Sorry Sonos. I hope Google wins an appeal.

Actually, it's very tricky to get to this to work, and even Sonos struggles to change volume simultaneously when you have 4+ speakers. WiFi is a big pain.

Why don't you tell us why it is tricky?

So? Google figured it out. The parents doesn't explain the tricky way to do it.

Maybe it is tricky, considering that Sonos can’t even get the volume adjustment of a single speaker to work, but unless they used specific technology/code developed by Sonos, how is affecting several volume controls/levels simultaneously at relative rates using rather basic math patentable to you?

Sure, maybe the rotten patent system allows it and the rotten court system validates the corruption, but that won’t change if people keep just referring to the corrupt methods implored. And I’m no fan of these corporations that are way too big and way too despotic.

Huh, did they patent a feature, or the implementation of that feature?

An implementation that keeps all of the volume levels in sync. I'm not convinced its more complicated than 2-phase commit, but that's kind of what you need in a distributed system.

Another idea: if you've already done the hard work of fanning out a synchronized audio stream to multiple speakers, you don't need any distributed logic to manipulate the audio stream itself. So just encode the volume change directly into the stream before fanning it out. I hope the Sonos lawyers don't come after me for this.

Google had a feature within the Home app that allowed users to change the volume of groups of speakers simultaneously, which infringed on a Sonos patent.

Apple has this with its HomePods. I wonder if Apple did it the legal way, or is just next in line for a lawsuit.

Was this lawsuit also about the now-removed feature where you could use your phone to change the volume while casting? Or was that separate?

I've posted on patents twice, very recently:

https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/no-source-code-no-patent

made the front page of HN.

https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/lets-vote-on-it

Inartfully written, I guess, and did not. The lawyers on Reddit hated it, though, so there's that.

Rants on HN change nothing. We have one every month. If you actually want to change the law, court cases will never do it. You need an Act of Congress.

Maybe they can use that money to make basic volume control functionality of their app function correctly.

probably the money already went to their lawyers

For how long this has played out, and the value of each company, this is not very much money at all.

I love how rock solid Sonos is at streaming across multiple speakers at once. I wish they made better software and had a selection of more attractive looking speakers.

Unrelated to the article: has google ever used their smart speaker spy tech to covertly place us citizens into an undisclosed matchmaking algorithm using location derived, e.g. from voice recognition from those smart speakers? Is that legal?

I am rooting for Sonos. They paved the way for Wi-Fi speakers years ago and built some fantastic products. Their UX can be poor, but they’re getting better with each release. For instance, setting up the latest subwoofer product, the Sub Mini, uses a combination of Bluetooth, WiFi and NFC to make the process fast and easy.

A pro tip for making your life so much easier with Sonos: plug one of the speakers in to Ethernet and then the others will use the proprietary Sonos Net wireless protocol instead of WiFi. It’s apparently much more reliable.

Why would you root for an anti-competitive company that would rather sue their competition than build a better product?

They said something about the company paving the way...

While I understand the perspective on their legal actions, Sonos's commitment to their product and their continued development of the multi-room audio space deserves some credit. Yes, they have had a number of high-profile lawsuits, but this isn't just a move to stifle competition, it's also about protecting their intellectual property. If a company doesn't protect its IP, it essentially undermines the value of their own innovation.

Competition can be fierce, and sometimes legal battles are a part of that landscape.

I'm thousands of dollars into their ecosystem and am looking for the off ramp and will switch if there ever is a viable competitor. Their mobile apps were never great but seem particularly bad lately.

My initial setup in 2019 was awful and involved eventually moving my sound bar to a different room to plug into my router directly. Then I discovered that true play, one of their selling features, was an iOS only feature and Android users were just screwed. Luckily, I had an iPad, only to discover they had also disabled the ability on there too and my only course of action was to have a friend come over and use their phone. In 2022 when I was setting up my sub, I found this still to be the case.

Once it was all setup however it worked amazingly well. Speaker in the bedroom, in the bathroom, and the living room. All sounded amazing and moving sound around in sync was so good.

But it seems like the software just keeps further diving into crap. After changing routers (and going through the hell of setting them up again) and adding a couple more speakers it just seems like a fifty percent chance if the app will show my speakers with a little wrench next to them and not play from my phone. My sub currently has a long ugly Ethernet cable going to my router and it seemed to not have helped at all. The latest forced update this week, showed me no speakers for a day.

I currently have a Bluetooth speaker on top of my Sonos speaker in the bathroom because it's just a waste of time in the morning to want to listen to the news or music and the speaker not show up or constantly time out.

I'm also tired of having my app choice for podcasts, ebooks, and music completely dictated by whether they have the resources to do a specific integration into Sonos. There's a lot of good open source apps out there for Android, where the authors just don't want to do an implementation because they don't own the speakers and it's actually a pain in the ass to integrate.

I've read about esphome and home assistant custom speakers to recreate a Sonos experience, but I'd just like to switch to a competitor if there is a viable alternative.

Google probably can pay that in Venmo

There's a threshold for large companies where they just settle and pay. Because the lawyers would be more expensive!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com