7 ms·

As far as I can tell, these are the patents mentioned in the document: Method and apparatus for adjusting volume levels in a multi-zone system - https://paten

• cushychicken 5y ago
  Sonos has worked hard since its founding to quietly amass an impressive stable of streaming audio IP. It's not a matter of "if" anyone is infringing on their IP. It's a matter of "who can they reasonably win a ruling against".
• comprambler 5y ago
  Where is the Logitech/Squeezebox/Slim Devices patent war chest here? They have had volume on multi zone prior to 2012, syncing audio playback devices together, as well as having multichannel audio going to different squeezeboxes. These all seem to have at least prior art behind them and thus are indefensible.
• joshspankit 5y ago
  Is this why it’s seemingly impossible to have synced wireless audio that’s not AirPlay or Sonos?
• sabertoothed 5y ago
  The patent system is so broken.
  • nceqs3 5y ago
    Yes, so broken that the original inventors of a product class had to spend $50 million on litigation in not even a court, but rather a quasi court in DC after a trillion dollar company stole their IP, because it's the last place where patent holders in the US get a reasonably fair shake.
    • cercatrova 5y ago
      Software patents are an anathema on innovation. I'd go so far as to say all corporate patents are a hindrance to innovation. We're not in the days of singular inventors profiting off their inventions, which I'm fine with, as when corporations become patent trolls or create such broad patents like "able to play back on a device," then it gets a little ridiculous.
      • TaylorAlexander 5y ago
        In my opinion all intellectual property restrictions reduce the rate of innovation, with the sum total of all present day laws dramatically reducing the rate of innovate compared to what it could be. For example 3D printers were patented in 1989, then first sold for $50k in 1995, sold still under patent for $25k ten years later, then patents expired in 2008, within three years a decent printer was $1800, and ten years after patents expired they were $250 available worldwide. Today Prusa Research ships more 3D printers in three weeks than Stratasys sold for the first 20 years of their operation. Imagine how much more productive mechanical engineers would have been if they had cheap 3D printers a decade sooner, and what the cumulative follow on effects would have been for the world. And then imagine what the economy would be like if everything moved that fast? It would change the nature of investment from less frequent massive investments to more frequent smaller investments as companies copied each other at will, but the rate of growth would be amazing! Think of how cheap we could make MRI machines and other medical imaging devices if this theory holds for that field. Not to mention the extreme worldwide inequality perpetuated by intellectual property restrictions. How fast would the African continent develop if they were legally allowed to clone and copy the world's best manufacturing equipment and product designs. Intellectual property is a disaster for humankind. So many people believe a fable about IP with no material basis in reality. We're told IP "encourages innovation" even when the actual material function of IP restrictions is to prohibit innovation around any patented idea.
• okwubodu 5y ago
  > Method and apparatus for adjusting volume levels in a multi-zone system - https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en Is this why I can’t change the volume on a Google Home speaker group anymore?
  • joshspankit 5y ago
    Behind closed doors, I like to ask CEOs these questions: “What patents are holding you back?” “What would you build right now if there were no restrictions from copyright/patents?” There are some very surprising (caveat: not to most of HN) patents that are holding us back.
  • metadat 5y ago
    I'm with you 100% here. It's unclear how often Googhomes receive updates, but at the beginning in 2019 my 9 Mini's worked great! But now for multiple speakers they are laggy and unreliable, sometimes just ending up in a neverending ding loop. Unfortunate to buy a product such as this and have functionality and experience quality steadily decline thereafter. Initially I was a huge fan and in love with the product. Perhaps I should've known better, since Big-G isn't exactly known for long-term support of anything unless it still makes them torrents of money. Sonos are in a similar boat, buy an older controller and the app will constantly nag you to upgrade, but not allow you to upgrade because the controller is "too old and no longer compatible".
  • awslattery 5y ago
    I don't use speaker groups, but could possibly be related to this issue from Android 12 -- where it seems Google walked back, disabled, or pulled out previously present functionality, possibly related to this litigation: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/201546605?pli=1 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/201546605?pli=1
  • jetrink 5y ago
    I wonder if any of those cover switching devices. You used to be able to say, "Hey Google, move that to the kitchen," and whatever you were listening to would stop and continue in the kitchen. It still understands the command, but then fails with an error. That feature was something that I used every morning as I moved through the house getting ready for the day. I can't point to a single thing that these devices do better than they did two years ago, but I can list several features that were important to me that are now either broken or missing.
• Closi 5y ago
  > System and method for synchronizing operations among a plurality of independently clocked digital data processing devices - https://patents.google.com/patent/US9195258B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9195258B2/en This one in particular seems way too broad. So... they have a patent on the concept of deducting latency from a message to synchronize clocks? (and then sending data with a timestamp for when it will play?)
  • koolba 5y ago
    I wonder if they keep their server times in sync with ntp.
  • yccs27 5y ago
    Interesingly, none of the specific claims referenced in the decision have to do with clock synchronization, they all focus on the act of grouping speakers in some way and controlling them together.
  • laserbeam 5y ago
    Irrespective of the patent details, this is actually a fun and not at all straightforward hardware project to implement. I had a failed attempt at this in uni, and synchronizing audio across multiple computers (rasps) is a really cool challenge.
    • izacus 5y ago
      But did you pay the rent to Sonos while you were doing that project? It's, after all, their intelectual property now.
      • texasbigdata 5y ago
        You don't know the year he/she went to University.
        • boondaburrah 5y ago
          you do know that raspis were involved, so it can't be before 2012. However, AirFoil/AirPlay existed before that and could do this.
• ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  Hopefully big G won't find a way to weasel out now that they don't have as much executive favor with the US government as they used to. Bear in mind this case is more than just Google using some common patents: Google worked with Sonos on a collaborative project as a way to gain access to internal details of how their technology worked, and then they stole it.
  • alisonkisk 5y ago
• nceqs3 5y ago
  Remember the ITC is NOT a court, it's part of the executive branch. Their decisions are appealable to the federal circuit but they are effectively never stayed pending appeal (because there is already an appeals process built into the ITC). There is an interesting counterintuitive game that is played where the defendant tries to get MORE of their products included in the exclusion order to make an appeal easier. Sonos could have requested a general exclusion order which would bar ANY infringing product from entering the US, but they only requested a limited exclusion order against Google Home products. Let the lobbying games begin... I am fairly confident that Biden will not overturn the ITC decision but you never know. Google also counter sued Sonos over Google's patents in multiple jurisdictions and Sonos has made it clear to investors that this is all a fight for a settlement.
  • dodobirdlord 5y ago
    At some point it becomes worth it to put in the effort to try to get the Sonos patents invalidated, and some of them seem very broad. Hard to believe that some of those things were “invented” only in the last 20 years. Most inventions aren’t patented, so I’d speculate that probably almost all patents could be invalidated by someone dedicated with a team of experts to scour history for prior art.
    • HotHotLava 5y ago
      There was nothing comparable to a modern multiroom smart speaker around in 2001, so they certainly were invented in the last 20 years. Whether that was by Sonos or by someone else, and whether these specific patents should have been granted is another question of course.
      • bluGill 5y ago
        I remember musik in the 1990s at the restaurant I worked at. We had it in the kitchen and a different channel in the seating area. Turn a switch on the wall to change channels, if the kitchen and seating were on the same channel then they had music in sync. Now this was an entirely hardwired system, and there was no remote. I don't know what sonos's patents are for, but the idea was in place and the difference is do it by wireless computer.
• yccs27 5y ago
  Google will probably have to get the patents themselves removed, by proving prior work or such. Those patents are way too broad. I wonder what Bose does, they have their own multiroom system. Do they license the patents from Sonos?
  • vineyardmike 5y ago
    > Do they license the patents from Sonos? IIRC Some other companies made agreements with Sonos to avoid suites (incl apple i blieve?), but sonos has claimed that google was bullying them over a number of things, including the claim that GAssistant only supports one assistant/wake word at a time, per contract, but alexa does not have this limitation. But thats apparently why the android app is worse, they don't support casting, and they're focusing on the apple/alexa ecosystem (airplay, etc).
    • sho_hn 5y ago
      The major feature the Android app lacks is the "Trueplay" tuning. It relies on a phone to generate and record a sound to map out a room's acoustics, then optimizes the Sonos speaker's output for the room. I've always been wondering if the lack of Trueplay support is due to shortcomings in Android's audio APIs or something like this.
      • kllrnohj 5y ago
        Things like that usually require knowing the hardware characteristics of the device itself as well as some form of calibration range. For iOS Sonos can just buy (or borrow) a couple of iphones every year to generate that data. Doing the same on Android gets a lot harder thanks to the more diverse hardware ecosystem.
• yccs27 5y ago
  The "novelty" (idk how novel it is really, but they present it as such) is not in speakers playing the same audio or L/R at the same time, but individual autonomous playback devices being grouped and ungrouped, so that they can be controlled as a unit when grouped.
  • codys 5y ago
    "Simple Jack panel, but computer controlled" is not novel and should not be patentable.
    • yccs27 5y ago
      Yeah, I'm absolutely not arguing this should be patentable. It seems like they are obvious and marginal (at best) changes to preexisting systems, even if they were the first ones to describe them. Still, the patents are not as boundlessly broad as some commenters here seem to think, for instance they clearly exclude hard-wired multispeaker systems.
  • yccs27 5y ago
    To those downvoting: Am I wrong here? Not defending the patents, I just want people to stop tearing down strawmen instead of the real thing.
    • boondaburrah 5y ago
      This sounds an awful lot like what I've been able to do with digital theatre sound systems for a long time, so I don't think it's novel.