Google Countersues Sonos

Google apparently isn’t giving in to the inevitable. Instead, it is countersuing Sonos for allegedly infringing on Google’s patents.

“Sonos has started an aggressive and misleading campaign against our products, at the expense of our shared customers,” a Google representative said. “[We launched these two lawsuits to] defend our technology and challenge Sonos’s clear, continued infringement of our patents.”

Sonos, of course, is the innovator here. And Google, of course, pretended that it was going to partner with Sonos and license its technology, only to go on to steal it and reimplement it in its own smart speakers and other connected products. So the statement above isn’t just fiction, it’s insanity: if Google cared about their shared customers, it would have simply licensed the Sonos technologies.

But that’s not what Google is doing. Instead, the cash-rich firm apparently intends to keep its much smaller rival buried in court documents and proceedings, because it can.

For those who don’t remember, Sonos won a major ruling against Google for its infringements in January, forcing Google to remove functionality from its smart products. But those changes didn’t meet the legal requirements, and so the US Customs Service announced in June that Google was still infringing on Sonos’s intellectual property. Clearly, Google is lashing out.

Google, please. Do the right thing, not just for your shared customers, but because it is the right thing. Stop stealing and posturing and just settle with Sonos and license its smart home technologies.