In what appears to be an ongoing legal battle between two tech companies, Google is suing Sonos (again) for patent infringement. The two latest cases are centred on patents that cover keyword identification, charging using "Google-invented methods," and figuring out which speaker from a group should respond to the keyword.
It should be noted that both of these lawsuits were submitted to the Northern District of California's U.S. District Court. Products from Sonos like the One, Arc, Beam, Move, and Roam were allegedly infringing on seven patents, according to Google.
"Sonos has chosen to compete in the courtroom at the expense of our mutual customers, rather than competing on the basis of innovation and product quality. Sonos has initiated an aggressive and deceptive campaign against our goods.
We prefer innovation to litigation, but their actions force us to protect our technology and take legal action against Sonos for its blatant, ongoing infringement of our patents, according to a statement from a Google representative, José Castaeda.
In the next days, the search engine giant also intends to file these accusations with the American International Trade Commission, Castaeda continued. Any products found to violate the aforementioned patents will be subject to an import ban at the request of the company.
The voice assistant recently introduced by Sonos was the target of Google's lawsuit, which claimed that Sonos was using patents for "enabling voice assistant technology and providing improvements to the efficiency, reliability, and durability of voice-controlled and battery-powered devices" without Google's consent.
For instance, it stated, "Sonos recently debuted its Sonos Voice Control feature to control its products in a power-efficient manner through the use of "hotwords," and to manage battery charging of its goods, utilising technologies pioneered by Google.
In response, Sonos said that Google was using this as an intimidation technique against the Santa Barbara-based maker of smart speakers in retaliation for Sonos' criticism of the search engine's monopolistic practises.
"Google previously sued us globally, but Sonos has won every case that has been decided. In contrast, the legal system has consistently backed Sonos' assertions that Google is violating the patents on its key smart speaker technology.
The new lawsuits filed by Google are an intimidation strategy meant to punish Sonos for publicly criticising the company's monopolistic practises, avoid paying a fair royalty to Sonos for the roughly 200 patents it is currently violating, and to stifle a smaller rival whose innovations it has stolen. "It won't work," declared Eddie Lazarus, Sonos' chief legal officer.
For a while now, Google and Sonos have been at odds over patents relating to wireless speakers. The latter secured a significant victory earlier this year when the USTC declared that Google had violated patents covering casting and group speaker controls. Then it had to eliminate some features, like a speaker set's single group volume control.
A Sonos patent relating to moving the playback queue of tunes from one speaker to another was invalidated last week by a Californian judge who sided with Google.
More specifically, seven separate smart speaker technologies are the subject of the complaint, which was filed in San Francisco's District Court of Northern California. The patent numbers are 10,593,330,10,134,398, and 7,705,565 in one complaint and 11,024,311, 9,812,128,9,632,748, and 11,050,615 in the other, according to material made accessible online.
Tech rivalry like this one are not new, though; a recent court victory by Nokia against Oppo led to the German markets being closed to the latter's handsets.