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We may never know if Google used their special insider access with Sonos to steal technology or not. But the optics certainly don’t look good.

• Bud 5y ago
  On the contrary, we already know, and the details in the suit prove it. Sonos engineers used packet sniffing. Google copied the precise techniques Sonos uses to set up and control speakers.
  • monocasa 5y ago
    That's how you're supposed to do it. The Precision Time Protocol was fully standardized before Sonos was founded specifically intended for synchronization of media streams across different systems (among other use cases). There were other similar schemes before that. This is why RTP even has a separate timestamp field when it could simply be computed from the sequence and media codec metadata. You didn't see it much in the consumer space at the time, but the professional music production studio space had to address these concepts back in the 90s.
  • tssva 5y ago
    The techniques used are standard protocols that almost all media devices use and not some proprietary technology of Sonos.
    • Bud 5y ago
      Not true. The setup techniques are not standard protocols. Far from it.
      • tssva 5y ago
        The setup technique that is covered by one of the parents is locating the device via a wireless signal outside of the wifi network, communicating the correct wifi network information to the device and then verifying that the device has properly connected to the wifi network. This is the standard iot device setup process using Bluetooth to locate and configure devices. The patent is just on this process but on a speaker versus some other type of iot device.