“Google copied the Sonos job”

Google should pay Sonos $32.5 million. Approximately NOK 359 million.

Sonos won again, but not all

It’s Law 360 that a jury has decided that Google violated a Sonos patent for how it grouped speakers together so they could play the same content. The same jury found that Google did not infringe the second patent, which covers how to control devices with smartphones or other devices using Google Home.

“This is a small dispute about some very specific features that are not commonly used. Of the six patents that Sonos has claimed to be infringed, only one has been found as such, and the rest have been dismissed as invalid or not infringed. We have always been advancing the technology “We competed on the merits of our ideas and are considering our next steps,” Google said after the ruling.

Sonos says:

“We are extremely grateful for the jury’s time and diligence in supporting the validity of our patents and acknowledging the value of Sonos’ invention of ‘area scenes. Other Sonos patents.

Overall, we believe Google is infringing more than 200 Sonos patents, and the award for damages issued today, based on a significant portion of our portfolio, demonstrates the exceptional value of our intellectual property. Our goal remains for Google to pay us a fair fee for the Sonos inventions it has appropriated.”

Sonos here references a ruling we reported on January 7, 2022:

The US International Trade Commission found that Sonos misused technology at Google. Sonos sued and won. Among other things, you won’t be able to ask your speakers to play the same thing, and you won’t be able to ask the system to set a specific volume on a set of speakers—instead, you’ll have to manually change the volume for each speaker via Google Assistant or an app. Home or Nest Hub”.

At the time, Google incorporated a number of changes following the ruling, and as you can see, the speaker groups were something that wasn’t affected:

To change the volume of a group of speakers, each speaker must be set individually. You also won’t be able to change the volume of the “speaker group” on the physical volume buttons of the mobile phone.
Most “speaker combos” should work as expected, but not if you have the speaker combo with other brands that work with Cast, such as JBL or Lenovo. This should be firmware version 1.52.272222 or later.
A small group of users will need to use the Device Utility application (DUA) to complete product installation and updates. You may get a prompt to download and run a DUA which will ensure your device is connected to WiFi and has the latest software.