Google sues Sonos for alleged patent infringement related to their wireless charging. Although Sonos won the initial battle in their long-running patent dispute with Google, the search giant has since started a counteroffensive.
According to the Android Republic article, Sonos has been a major participant in the audio industry for many years and already has a sufficient number of patents to defend its goods. They apparently fought a struggle with Google, one of the biggest businesses in the world, over the patents they had.
Google sues Sonos over alleged patent issue
The conflict began “following the operation of Google Home.” The business won the first game, forcing Google to alter the way Google Home gadgets communicate with one another, the report says.
Following the technique utilized by Google Home to interact with one another and work together in teams of numerous devices, Sonos filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Google. Although Google had already begun rolling out a new system after the corporation won the lawsuit, the speaker experience for the Nest division continued to deteriorate.
As reported in the Court House News, the tech giant has chosen to initiate a counterattack. Google sues Sonos over the violation of seven patents, one of which is the wireless speaker charging system.
As previously mentioned, Sonos accused Google of violating one of its patents after learning about Google Home’s system and how it interacted with other gadgets. Due to the company’s success in the litigation, Google was forced to develop a new method.
The new system had already been implemented, but that did not stop the Nest division’s speaker experience from deteriorating. According to The Verge, Google has now taken the initiative and sued Sonos twice.
The lawsuits are being brought, according to Google spokesperson José Castaeda, to “defend our technology and challenge Sonos’s clear, continued infringement of our patents.” Sonos has “started an aggressive and misleading campaign against our products, at the expense of our shared customers,” The Verge reports.
Google claims that Sonos violated seven of its patents for smart speakers. The patents that were violated were with rapid charging the Sonos roam as well as voice detection in the presence of many speakers.
According to reports, Sonos used voice detection methods covered by the patents to identify certain terms using its speaker system. The system determines who is in charge of replying after identifying the case’s keywords.
In order to make its home speaker system compatible with Google Play Music, the tech giant announced its alliance with Sonos back in 2013, according to the Court House News. 2016 saw a new request from Sonos to Google for assistance in making its speaker to work with the voice-activated Google Assistance.
Sonos first sued Google just two years ago for utilizing the agreement to build its own smart speaker dubbed the Chromecast Audio and then the Google Home while also getting a sneak peek at Google’s technology.
As a result of the case being filed in a federal court in Los Angeles, Google is now alleging that Sonos exploited their assistance in helping the company enhance its products and stole their technology when it came to “wireless charging and voice control features.”
Some of Google’s products’ features have to be changed. One particularly frustrating development for owners of many Google speakers was the removal by Google of the option to control the volume of a group of speakers at once. The lawsuits filed today appear to be an effort by Google to exert pressure on Sonos as the two companies argue over features.
Before you leave, you can learn how to fix the most common Google Nest Wi-Fi problems.