Alphabet-owned Google is about to go to trial on Could 8 over the patent infringement case introduced towards it by speaker maker Sonos.
In 2020, Santa Barbara-based Sonos sued Google for patent infringement, accusing it of infringing 5 Sonos patents associated to speaker options.
“Virtually a decade after Sonos created the smart-speaker market, Google entered the area. Initially, Google sought to work with Sonos and, by means of these efforts, gained entry to Sonos’s engineers, merchandise, and expertise,” Sonos stated in its September 2020 lawsuit.
The speaker producer accused Google of growing and promoting merchandise that copied Sonos’s expertise.
The pair labored with Google in late 2011 to combine the Google Play Music service into the Sonos ecosystem. This led to the launch of Google Play Music on the Sonos platform in 2014.
Nonetheless, in 2015, Google began “willfully infringing Sonos’s patents,” resulting in the launch of Chromecast Audio, Sonos stated in its lawsuit.
In 2019, Sonos added Google Assistant assist to its app. On the time, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence known as the combination “a significant milestone for the business,” including that the corporate is dedicated to having a number of voice assistants on its app “as quickly as potential”.
However in its lawsuit filed in 2020, Sonos claimed that Google’s misappropriation of its patented expertise proliferated in 2015 when the tech big expanded its wi-fi multi-room audio system to greater than a dozen infringing merchandise together with the Google Dwelling Mini, Google Dwelling, Google Dwelling Max, and Pixel telephones, tablets, and laptops.
Sonos is in search of monetary damages and a ban on gross sales of Google’s audio system, smartphones and laptops within the US. By 2021, the Royal Financial institution of Canada estimated that Google offered over 100 million Google Dwelling units within the US alone, producing greater than $8 billion in income.
In response to the claims, Google in a separate courtroom submitting in September 2020 stated Sonos’s litigation marketing campaign has harmed the reputations of its merchandise.
Google claimed that Sonos requested for its help in 2013 to combine with Google’s Play Music service.
“Google gave Sonos that help, and offered important engineering sources, technical assist, and different sources to combine Sonos’ merchandise with Google’s Play Music service in 2014,” the tech firm stated.
Google added that Sonos has made “false claims” about its shared work and Google’s expertise in lawsuits that it filed towards Google.
US District Decide William Alsup invalidated one of many patents that Sonos accused Google of infringing. Alsup dominated that Google didn’t infringe on one of many patents.
Nonetheless, he rejected Google’s request to cancel the opposite two patents earlier than the trial on Could 8.
Reuters just lately reported that Sonos gained a restricted import ban on some Google units from the US Worldwide Commerce Fee (ITC) final 12 months, whereas Google sued Sonos for patent infringement on the ITC and in California.
Music Enterprise Worldwide