Google wins reprieve from $32M verdict in Sonos patent fight

Haskell is his middle name… literally!

(Okay, not technically relevant, but it is an amazing coincidence. He does have a programming hobby, albeit not using the Haskell language.)

Alsup is semi-retired since 2021.

They treat their hardware like it's a phone or computer, something to upgrade every year or two and old versions discarded. They have no problem bricking it in a couple of years and expect you to buy a newer version. Perfectly functional hardware.

This last round of bricking was to bring about a faster CPU in the speakers, as if that matters. Didn't add features, just faster CPU.

Their support is pretty atrocious. They will always blame your router for not handling "point to point internal networking" correctly, as if that's a real possibility. They tell you you have to make one of their speakers your router and your current router needs to be put in AP mode.

Honestly they probably needed the faster CPU because they expect any of their speakers to be used a routers.

They broke literally all my hardware with an upgrade path. I had 6 or so sonos speakers which are now just pretty white bricks. Theoretically some of them will be usable if I update the app to the new sonos app but when I try that it (firstly) says some of them aren't compatible with the new app and (secondly) just plain doesn't find any of the others. And yes I have tried connecting them directly so I have a hub with just my wifi router and the sonos device connected via ethernet and I'm standing right next to it with my phone showing 5 bars of wifi strength and it can't find the speaker.

> Patents should benefit small companies with actual products in the market.

Which would be great, except as the ruling states, Sonos didn't introduce the feature in the market until 5 years after Google did:

> The essence of this order is that the patents issued after an unreasonable, inexcusable, and prejudicial delay of over thirteen years by the patent holder, Sonos, Inc. Sonos filed the provisional application from which the patents in suit claim priority in 2006...Google then began introducing its own products that practiced the invention in 2015. Even so, Sonos waited until 2019 to pursue claims on the invention (and until 2020 to roll out the invention in its own product line).

Like small companies patent trolling bigger ones as their entire business model.

Patents as a whole is entirely negative force. The original thought to make the inventor be able to profit off the invention is long gone. Near every single one is corporate backed and used to stem the competition

The biggest difference I saw because of the Sonos lawsuit was you couldn't change the volume of every device at once.

Is Sonos the reason why they discontinued it?

You have to consider the fact that workarounds are dime a dozen.

In any case, startups aren't exactly in a position to gamble away their endowment in a court battle, which can trivially get stretched out by their megacorp opponents until they run out of cash.

I don't see how patents on trivial stuff like synchronized playback are supposed to help startups. The big corporations are sitting on enormous piles of those which makes entering their markets extremely risky.

> In this case, Google can now clone Sonos' hardware and synchronized play algorithms and block Sonos from accessing YouTube Music.

how did you come to this outcome, that Google could and would do this?

What does this patent has to do with Google blocking them from accessing YouTube Music?

>To protect giant companies against small startups that are trying with all of their might? I'm not so sure.

Startups aren't trying to compete with large companies, they're trying to get bought up by them. If your goal is to compete, patents are a nice-to-have, but you can still compete on being more flexible than a giant lumbering tech company. The whole mythology of "disruption" depends on it, because there are natural diseconomies of scale. When you get big, you get stupid.

If your goal is acquisition, however, then patents are entirely necessary, because otherwise - what are tech companies buying?

In this case, Google should be allowed to clone the shit out of Sonos, and Sonos should have legally mandated access to the YouTube Music accounts of any user who consents to Sonos products accessing their data. Interoperability is far more important to startups that are actually trying to remain independent rather than providing a nice juicy VC exit. With the current state of "IP"[0], any startup trying to build an interoperable product is at the mercy of their competitors who can kill the API keys of products they are cloning.

I'd rather live in the world where big tech is at constant risk of being scraped to death than the world where the only thing startups can bring to the table are poorly-worded and overbroad patents that big tech can use to kill other startups.

[0] Read: laws that let you opt out of having competitors. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) falls under this umbrella.

> To protect giant companies against small startups that are trying with all of their might? I'm not so sure.

They ain't doing it now either.

I think more useful model might be shortening it (5 years for anything but medical and such ought to be enough to monetize most) and enforcing profit share into patent law itself.

say 20% of the revenue on the product divided to the owners of patent used (excluding subsidiares and other related entities of company using patent).

Then the original "inventor" (as joke as it is in software...) gets not only the money but also good profit margin advantage over big corp to market

It doesn’t teed changing

The constitution doesn’t insist that patents exist, just that congress is the one who regulates them if they do

The 32 million is pocket change. What's important is whether the import ban on infringing Google devices is related to this judgement, or if that was a separate case.

It also materially changed the experience of Google's products for the worse. I am curious how that might have impacted their bottom line (as small as home devices are to their business).