Google Sues Sonos in Escalation of Wireless Speakers Fight

Google escalated a fight with Sonos over the wireless home-speaker market, filing a lawsuit that alleges patent infringement. From a report: The conflict between the two companies, which had been collaborating on incorporating some Google features in Sonos's speakers, erupted in January when Sonos sued Google for infringing its patents. The speaker maker is facing increased competition from tech giants such as Google and Amazon.com that are expanding into selling Internet-connected home gadgets, including less expensive wireless speakers. "Sonos has made false claims about the companies' shared work and Google's technology in the lawsuits," the Alphabet unit said in a complaint filed Thursday in San Francisco federal court. "While Google rarely sues other companies for patent infringement, it must assert its intellectual property rights here." Sonos, the Santa Barbara-based pioneer of wireless speakers, is using Google's patented technology for search, software, networking, audio processing and digital-media management and streaming, while refusing to pay a license, according to the lawsuit.

Re:

[andydread]

yeah yeah yeah the reflexive google is evil thing. So Sonos sues Google and what you are saying is that they should not defend themselves right? because just the act of defending themselves is evil? got it.

Bob should have used the nuclear option

[DaveV1.0]

Bob Bemer had a patent for the escape code and could have put an end to all these tech suits if he had sued everyone who filed a patent suit against another company.

I think he patented his Y2K idea, not Esc

[raymorris]

While Bemer did add the escape character to the ASCII code, I don't think he has a patent about that. If he did have a patent, it would have expired in 1980.

If we pretend that he had a patent, and we pretend that patent didn't expire 20 years after he created the escape character, then we would have to look at what that pretend patent actually said. It would probably be along the lines of "when this code is encountered, the program should stop what it's doing and go look at it's escape handler". Except it

They should get married

[WaffleMonster]

Sonos and Google deserve each other. Their offspring no doubt will have Sauron's eyes.

Sonos delenda est

[Mike Van Pelt]

Whatever Google's ... deficiencies ... in the ethics department may be, Sonos decided to brick their older speakers, "Ha ha, tough cookies, you need to buy new speakers from us that'll work for a couple more years before we brick them, too. We'll give you a bit of a discount on the new ones. See what nice guys we are?"

That puts them on my "No way in ***HELL***" list. Permanently. I don't care what happens to them, other than they be rendered incapable of defrauding more customers in the future.

Re:

[cyniscus]

And Google's never killed any of their old products and services?? https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]

Re:

[Mike Van Pelt]

Oh, yeah, Google kills products all the time, sometimes products I like.

But....

They have not deliberately bricked an expensive piece of hardware that has no business whatsoever needing "cloud" entanglements. Buy an expensive Sonos speaker, and they may kill it, again, just to make you buy another one.

Google doesn't sell much hardware, but I don't think they've done a "Ha ha, we're bricking our phones, you need to buy a new one."

It's time for the antitrust case

[hacker_news_rocks]

Bring on the DOJ. Tear Google apart. They're clearly abusing their asymmetric power.

Well we know what Google is

[martinX]

Google is asshole.