Sonos Sues Google for Patent Infringement Again
- Paul Thurrott
- Sep 30, 2020
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For the second time this year, smart speaker maker Sonos has sued Google for infringing on its patent portfolio.
Sonos, as you may recall, first sued Google in January for infringing 100 of its patents in its own line of Home- (now Nest-) branded smart speakers. Google countersued a few months later, alleging that the smart speaker maker made false claims against it and stole its intellectual property, which would be hilarious if this wasn’t so serious.
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So what’s this new suit all about? It appears that Sonos has found five more patents that Google is infringing on.
“Sonos has already sued Google for infringing patents on its first group of inventions involving the set-up, control, playback, and synchronization of wireless playback devices,” the new suit explains. “This case involves a second group of inventions which … tackle the novel technological challenges of how to stream music from a cloud-based service, how to create, manage, and invoke ‘zone scenes’ to configure how multiple playback devices work together, and how to dynamically adjust the equalization of a playback device based on the environment in which the playback device is operating.”
The Sonos legal filing details the history of Google’s various infringements a second time. But it also provides more information about each of the new infringements, if you’re curious. That it comes on the eve of a Google product launch that is expected to include a new generation of Google Nest smart speakers is, perhaps, not coincidental.