>Sonos waited until 2019 to pursue claims on the invention (and until 2020 to roll out the invention in its own product line).
What was the feature that Sonos introduced in 2020 that was being fought over?
What was the feature that Sonos introduced in 2020 that was being fought over?
> Then, in 2019, Sonos filed continuation applications for the patents in suit. To get around the prior art, Sonos sought to patent zone scenes with a new twist: overlap. With overlap, a zone player could be a member of more than one zone scene at the same time
It turns out that what Sonos did was even more scummy than implied by lights0123. In addition to this being something Sonos didn't implement until much later, it was actually Google who first suggested this idea to Sonos.
> This was thirteen years after Sonos filed the provisional application, but also five years after Google had itself disclosed overlapping zone scenes to Sonos, and four years after Google had released products that implemented the feature.
It's interesting to read the comments from half a year ago with this knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36093764
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7571014B1/en
Spoiler, it contains a detailed description of the functionality, complete with UI mockups and flow charts. It does not contain any novel method for keeping audio in sync between rooms, for example.
It is insane to me that this is patentable.
Every software patent is like this, I've never seen anything relevant yet that I can't come up myself thinking about domain. They are very vague and useless on purpose.
So back in 2006 Genelec was already doing all of this and had shipped products to the market.
https://www.genelec.com/previous-models/8250a
https://assets.ctfassets.net/4zjnzn055a4v/2Jy6loSGRWecUWacsq...
https://www.genelec.com/-/blog/glm-and-smart-active-monitori...