> As Reuters reported on Monday, the reasoning boils down to this: according to the judge, Sonos wrongly linked a pair of patent applications in 2019 to a much earlier provisional application from 2006 in an attempt to claim “a priority date before Google’s disclosures and product releases” that would thus put Google under “a cloud of infringement.” Sonos is also said to have discreetly made amendments to the documents, which greatly frustrated the judge.
If this is true, Sonos needs to be punished for such behavior. They clearly abused the patent system for their benefit, I'm surprised this wasn't brought up during the initial trial. Maybe it was, but I don't recall anyone discussing it.
Left Google on Friday, it's nice to be able to say this openly.
Though, I should at least clarify I had nothing to do with anything close to this, and don't have any information on it that I could have received from working at Google.
This was an incredibly crappy lawsuit and whatever Sonos claimed was repeated unquestioned, universally.
Sonos way over-reacted to the idea of speakers with assistants in them and made it seem existential, hence this sudden rush in 2019. I had just invested in their system, and never ever will invest in Sonos equipment again, solely due to this. Both my Pixel and Sonos got worse because Sonos' leadership needed to stroke their confirmation bias that they were in competition with Google.
> Left Google on Friday [...] crappy lawsuit and whatever Sonos claimed was repeated unquestioned, universally.
Type "sonos" into the HN search at the bottom -> click first result about patent claim -> top comment in that thread says "Not here to defend Google, but how can something trivial like that even be patentable?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890921
The replies to that comment are in similar vein. The next top-level reply is also critical of Sonos albeit not related to patents ("you don't own the speakers you have bought"). Scrolling some more, I don't see anyone supporting Sonos or repeating their claim, not even with questioning, let alone universally.
Moving to the next relevant search result, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29831929, the top comment leads with some links to the patents so people can find what is actually being discussed, then says "I'm a big fan of Sonos products but this ruling won't go through, right?" The direct reply is "[quote from patent] This one in particular seems way too broad." The next top-level comment complains about this being why Android lost some functionality (maybe not taking a side I guess, but more leaning towards Google than Sonos), with the next top-level comment having a similar message: "It sounds like an absolute nightmare for users".
If you remember Sonos' patent claims as having been universally defended by people, that may have been seen from behind a certain filter or bubble
Anyway, I don't know that saying "I'm team Sonos" or "I'm team Google" helps a discussion in the first place. I'd discuss the thing on merits
> Anyway, I don't know that saying "I'm team Sonos" or "I'm team Google" helps a discussion in the first place. I'd discuss the thing on merits
I agree! For the record, I didn't say either of those things :) Apologies, but I don't see team or identifying with either.
Sorry if I missed it.
> Sonos' patent claims as having been universally defended by people, that may have been seen from behind a certain filter or bubble
I'm guessing it was "universally" that inspired you: apologies, I definitely did not mean everyone, not even everyone on the internet, not even everyone on HN! Just a throwaway word in a flow of typing: brains are weird like that.
It means a lot to me that someone put in so much effort to make sure to understand there wasn't a false dichotomy here. You're, no exaggeration, a hero for standing up when people do this. Drives me nuts too.
FWIW, you didn't have to put in that much work, as short as "Universally?" would have sufficed. (apologies if I misunderstand: I'm not sure exactly what led to the strong, helpful, contribution, but I'm assuming that the root was 'universally')
Not just the universally, it's also that it doesn't seem like unquestioned to me. Though I'm sure one would be able to find subgroups taking Sonos' side if one went looking beyond popular opinions
Good. Back in 2017 I wanted to set up multi-room audio and the only options were Sonos and Chromecast Audios.
I got the whole thing done for the cost of 1 Sonos speaker.
In Jan of 2019 standalone Chromecast Audio devices were discontinued and support for them has dwindled ever since. Apparently this was around the time of the Sonos lawsuit.
Of course, Google cancels projects constantly, but it sure looks like in this case they killed something genuinely cool and useful due to patent trolling.
> As Reuters reported on Monday, the reasoning boils down to this: according to the judge, Sonos wrongly linked a pair of patent applications in 2019 to a much earlier provisional application from 2006 [...] Sonos is also said to have discreetly made amendments to the documents, which greatly frustrated the judge.
> Above all else, [judge] says Sonos simply waited far too long to raise [the patent claim, namely 13 years]
> Sonos says [the] decision is “wrong on both the facts and law” and plans to appeal
I don't understand the ruling. Why would it be illegal to start to enforce your patent later into your exclusivity period, is there a clause that says that? I'll agree that waiting 13 years will let you collect 13 years of royalties instead of the 1 year you might have gotten if you had sued after 1 year, so it's a dick move to squeeze more money out, but if this is what Sonos is referring to about the ruling being 'wrong on facts and law', I could see their viewpoint even if I don't agree with the law.
In Dutch consumer law, I know that you can't come to the retailer 23 months into owning a product to say that the power button was broken from day one and expect a free repair. You need to tell them that in a timely manner for warranty to be provided. If there is a clause in USA patent law that says the same, then the ruling would make sense, but the article doesn't really say, and if there were such a clause, then how could they have won the lower court case? So I would assume there is no such clause.
And the part about modifying your patent documents "discreetly", err, is that not perjury?
What they did is that they filed a provisional application in 2006. This is not a patent, it is just a simple way of saying "I did this". This way, you can release your invention and apply for an actual patent later without the risk of having it rejected for prior art. A provisional application doesn't grant you exclusivity, only the right to file a patent later, where later normally means less than a year.
Then Sonos filed a patent in 2018 based on that provisional application, well after that reasonable 1 year delay. By the time, the industry has built something based on that 2006 non-patent.
Essentially, Sonos tried to patent the thing retroactively.
They didn't start enforcing a patent 13 years later, because they didn't even have a patent to enforce.
Basically Sonos took a patent application that had been filed 13 years earlier but not granted (due to prior art), modified it to add a feature Google was already shipping but Sonos wasn't, and resubmitted it for a new evaluation. The patent was granted but backdated to the time of the original filing in 2006.
Wait, if Sonos tried to patent a feature that Google was already shipping (in their products, I assume you mean) at the time of filing, why was that not also rejected for prior art?
My reading of the ruling[0] is that Sonos lied to the patent examiner, and claimed that all of the new material had been in the application since 2006 rather than having been just inserted.
> On Sonos’s representation that its amendment to the specification and figures contained no new matter, the patent examiner allowed the amendments to the
applications for the patents in suit
(They then proceeded to lie about this to the judge in the original trial as well.)
My opinion, is that society would be best served by a limited number of patents awarded each year with 'vastly ample time' for reviewers to consider the most innovative things, find prior art, and for potentially impacted industries to also bring forth their own research on prior art and how innovative experts in that useful art find the patent.
Plus they should be required to be written in a way that's useful to someone in the industry, rather than just lawyers.
An issue with that, it seems, is it wouldn't decrease the barrier to applying for a patent. It is my understanding that patents were invented to help smaller operations keep hold of their designs while allowing bigger operations to release their innovations rather than keeping them completely shrouded. Neither of these tenets are upheld anymore. Large companies use patents as a bully mechanism and also as a preventative/precedent mechanism to patent things long before, if ever, incorporating them into actual products. They just use patents to land grab. Patents today are highly skewed towards large, rich corporations who can afford the lawyers to create and then protect them. Meanwhile, smaller companies are screwed as it is very expensive to create and protect patents, and there's basically nothing a small company can do if a large corporation just up and copies a patented thing.
In general, the patent system is completely broken at this point. It only benefits large and mega corporations, and foreign countries ignore it anyway. So it just is harming the overall ecosystem.
How does limiting the number of grants increase the amount of time available for reviewers? If anything, a company would be incentivized to submit more applications in the hope that something sticks or at least drowns out the potentially more innovative competition, if only theirs look shinier at first glance and warrant more investigation.
If this is true, Sonos needs to be punished for such behavior. They clearly abused the patent system for their benefit, I'm surprised this wasn't brought up during the initial trial. Maybe it was, but I don't recall anyone discussing it.