For example, these changes mean you'll no longer be able to control the volume of a group of speakers. Instead, you'll have to change the volume on each individually. It also means you'll no longer be able to use the volume buttons on your phone to control a speaker group.
Not here to defend Google, but how can something trivial like that even be patentable?
The system has not been able to define a solid test for "non-obviousness" which is one of the criteria for patentability. As a result, in my experience, approvals are based most notably on "novelty" -- If no one has seemingly done in the past, it tends to get approved.
In my opinion, that's what has gone wrong with the system, i.e., not the theoretical criteria for patentability but its execution.
The core problem is that for someone knowledgeable in the field, everything becomes straightforward, but the further away you are from the field, the more novel it becomes -- this is true across the board. Even the great accomplishments where people win Nobel prizes, often it can be argued that it was going to happen anyhow because it was the next step in scientific progress given the context.
Thus defining "non-obviousness" is super hard to do -- because it is all context dependent and humans are like a million monkeys inventing everything that can possibly be invented in aggregate.
It is not true that anyone knowledgeable in a field finds everything in that field straightforward. For example, Schoof's algorithm for counting points on elliptic curves was so non-obvious to relevant experts that he struggled to get his paper through peer review. Diffie also struggled to get his ideas about public-key cryptography published because experts in relevant fields did not understand how such an idea could even make sense. Another example is Gentry's original FHE construction, which was not at all obvious even to experts in lattice theory or any other relevant field of cryptography or math. It pains me to say this, but Bitcoin is also an example; check out the response on the cryptography mailing list, where several prominent experts in the field were confused by the concept of electronic payments that do not require any bank to issue and redeem the money.
Those are just what I know off the top of my head from my own field. While there is plenty of incremental research in any field and plenty of situations where a motivated expert would have arrived at the same basic concept, it is not outlandishly uncommon for a truly novel, non-obvious idea to be presented. The problem for patent examiners is that they are not experts and the pace of software innovation leaves them baffled by the applications they are examining; there are also too few patent examiners to handle the volume of applications that are submitted.
One way to address the problem is to just abolish software patents entirely. Software was never meant to be patentable, at least not if you recognize software as a form of applied math (happy to argue this one all day long) and accept the idea that math is not (or should not be) patentable.
Controlling volume to a set of speakers via a remote is something we’ve been doing in the analog world for decades. So a general patent on volume control across speakers should be invalidated.
It only becomes novel due to the details of the tech. But even then you could implement the solution in various ways and I can’t imagine every potential method was patented.
So, while I agree the non-obvious can be hard to define. But with patents like this I don’t think we’ve found the right balance.
At a previous company, we had to _add code_ to our software in order to avoid violating a patent. Yes, if we just let our system do what it could, that violated a patent. We had to check for a certain condition, and disallow the generic system from doing a specific thing, in order to not get in trouble. Sorry, but that's insane.
I dealt with a manufacturing patent where you had to align certain parts off-center, because lining them up was patented. Of course it didn't really matter how you did it. Hence a subsequent patent was eventually actually awarded to someone else to manufacture them off-center. Which was far worse if you think about it. The first patent claimed a unique point. The next one claimed the entire three-dimensional volume of possible alternatives--minus that unique point.
The patent in questions covers using a controller device on a LAN which presents a UI to the user to raise, lower or mute/unmute volume which then raises, lowers or mutes/unmutes the volume across a set of speakers grouped together on the LAN. It does not cover a specific method of doing this. Any method accomplishes the above would be covered by the patent.
I feel like "using a UI that communicates over LAN", on it's own, isn't something that should be patentable for anything at this point. That's just basic network communication now. Now, if the device being communicated with did something interesting maybe there is a case on that end, but I'm not familiar enough to comment.
give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent and not how the patent implements the claim.
If the experts can find a way to implement the claim in a relatively short period, then the claim is obvious and should be rejected.
Of course it is possible that a more specific claim is not obvisous. For example, if there are specific performance requirements. If the initial claims are obvisious, the inventor can try again with more narrow claims.
Another requirement that is sorely needed is that an expert in the field can actually understand the patent in a reasonable period of time.
that's not really going to work though.. there have been (and must still be) tons of "obvious" solutions to well-known problems..
So if you could simply "give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent" and have them actually come up with something.. Well, then it'd be trivial to simply rewrite existing unsolved problems in "claim of method to solve problem" and they'd magically be able to solve it?
The problem is that obvious solutions become obvious only when they arrive, and not before.
Even framing a problem so that it can be solved is an example of this.. There are lots of problems that only appear after their solution. Before the solution, they weren't problems, but simply "how things are". Like, right now, we've not solved death, so for most people, it's not really a problem, it's just how things are.. If we solve death, future people will look back at us in disbelief: (You try to tell me people just DIED? and the entire world didn't unite to fix that? what the fuck was wrong with them? guess they got what they deserved..)
I'm just saying, that if your claims have obvious solutions, then the community has no need for your patent. The patent has to solve something that is not obvious.
For the community, it is only worth granting a patent if the community gets something back in return. And that is, solving a problem we don't know how to solve. Obviously, that can be with efficiency parameters. If the simple solution is 50% efficient and the patent claims 90%. That may be worth the patent. And everybody else can keep using the 50% efficient solution.
In your example, if you now come up with a patent that solves death, then no expert will be able to find a solution in reasonable period.
If you can then show a working version that solves death, even if it is completely obvious in retrospect, it is worth a patent.
I like this idea, but the pro-patent argument says that some things become obvious only after you see them. Once a company starts selling a product with the new idea, everyone will figure it out, and it will become part of the set of things that are obvious to experts.
In my opinion that's not what patents are about. Patents are about how to do something. The obvious purpose is that revealing your patent advances the state of the art.
Otherwise, why would the community grant a relatively long term (about 20 years) of monopoly? It doesn't make sense to do that just for a clever business idea.
I basically agree with you. The counterargument says that some innovation simply doesn't happen for centuries, until it finally occurs to someone. You want to incentivize those kinds of innovations as well, to get people to revisit old issues. For example, the stirrup. Evident once you see it, but a big innovation, or it would have shown up centuries earlier.
A lot of things once explained seem obvious, but clearly weren't or they would have existed before.
I like to explain it as similar to wheels being circles. Of course that is obvious once you see a circle shaped wheel, but the insight to do that in the first place is the novelty element.
Similar advances are happening in every little niche industry and novelty implies non-obvious.
The problem is that things that are already well known and obvious are being granted patents because “but with software” gets tacked onto the end.
“Control a group of speakers” - not patentable
“Control a group of speakers, but with software” - patentable
Maybe there’s some really interesting way Sonos controls speakers with software that should be patentable. But “with software” is not novel on its own.
This is certainly the ideal scenario. But typically, they didn't exist before because they are incremental improvements based on things which didn't exist before and use technology which didn't exist before.
The claim that they are obvious is based on the fact that anyone who is involved in the production of those prior incremental steps can see what can be done as the next increment. People are working on producing wheels using molds and certain materials. Across town, someone starts selling a new kind of mold or material. The "inventor" applies it to the molding of wheels.
The difficulty is that it is really hard to claim something as obvious/non-obvious once you know about it. Basically can't determine if it is something that was incremental based on progress -or- if it just seems like that now that you know about it in hindsight.
Agree with your point though, and it may just be one of those impossible questions which is why the patent office struggles with how to make these decisions.
I'm having trouble thinking of examples of what you mean. It's not like people invent new branches of math to make a patent like with revolutionary ideas in physics. Do I get 6-12 months (or even more) working on the same problem and subject to the same constraints and available technologies the inventor had? A really "prophetic" idea can probably be identified as such because it's far too ahead of its time to get patented or used anyway.
But when it comes to money-making patents, I think of technological development as an optimization process where everyone has the same objectives and a pretty limited search area at each point in time (available technologies you can use, textbook knowledge you can draw on). I'd generally expect any smart and dedicated person working on the problem to find the next best next steps sooner or later (certainly far less than 20 years).
It is a hard idea to correlate since you can't unwind knowledge. I think your idea around giving a person X time to come up with solution could work if the patent office could afford that.
Maybe take a 3rd party who is unaware of the patent/novel idea and then asking them how to solve for some generalized version of the problem that a patent states it is solving and see what happens.
Similar to black boxing that companies will do with tech that may have been shared under restricted terms.
I've been in the same niche for years and can certainly tell you what I could and couldn't figure out. There's no magic in what I do, else only 23 year-old geniuses who think outside the box would be dominating all the patents. Even nobel prizes are on average awarded for work done at middle age.
Just do peer review and get experts' opinions. Don't tell them how to make it work, just tell them what it does. E.g. make the inventor provide a carefuully-worded abstract. By the way patents that claim the category of problem itself as the invention (as opposed to the specific method for solving the problem) are another big problem that needs to be eliminated. Those broad first claims are the ones shot down in challenges. For example "use a computer to processs transactions", or even "use a convolutional network to classify faces". These are not inventions; they are problems that still need to be solved, and it can be done many ways.
Anyway if you're uncertain about 6-months, how can you justify giving them 20 years of monopoly?
It's about costs, networked speakers for pro-consumers was never a thing it was just too expensive. Until it wasn't and then you obviously had to controll them together.
Yes--basically a tech like Bluetooth will come out and then a bunch of dumb patents will come out for 'controlling a microwave with bluetooth' and 'controlling refrigerator with bluetooth' and the patent will be approved even though they are completely obvious and the exact same thing.
If the USPTO gets to keep any part of the fees it charges, it is heavily incentivized to allow silly patents through the "non-obvious" gate. Defining "non-obvious" might be tricky, but fixing the incentives would be comparatively straightforward if they are half as broken as they appear to be.
I’m pretty sure the USPTO is not a money making venture. It’s chronically understaffed and ill equipped to deal with the volume of bullshit it receives.
Also, what exactly do these patents cover? Every wired stereo I’ve seen had a volume control that changed the volume on all speakers. I’m sure such systems were already common half a century ago.
From my reading of the patent, it's not that the concept of speaker groupings was patented. Rather, a specific UI for showing and modifying the groupings and adjusting the volume. Unfortunately, there aren't many different ways to represent groupings in a UI.
Again, it’s not the controlling of the speakers that was patented, it was the UI for grouping them and controlling them. Bluetooth headphones generally have the same controls as normal headphones, so they wouldn’t apply to this patent.
This is incorrect. The patent doesn't cover any specific UI. Part of what the patent covers is a controller on a network presenting a UI to control volume on a group of speakers not a specific implementation of the UI.
Here is the abstract, you can see that it clearly is about the interface of creating and controlling the play group:
> A multimedia controller including a processor, the controller configured to: provide a user interface for a player group, wherein the player group includes a plurality of players in a local area network, and wherein each player is configured to playback a multimedia output from a multimedia source; accept an input to facilitate formation of the player group, indicating that at least two of the players in the local area network are to be included in the player group; for each of the plurality of players within the player group, accept an input to adjust a volume associated with the player, that causes the player to adjust its volume; and accept an input to adjust a volume associated with the player group, wherein the input to adjust the volume associated with the group causes the players in the player group to adjust their volumes.
> This application is a Continuation of U.S. Ser. No. 12/035,112, entitled “User Interfaces For Controlling And Manipulating Groupings In A Multi-Zone Media System”
You need to read the claims in the patent. That is what the patent actually covers. The claims include the controller presenting a UI but that is not the only claim in the patent. Besides that the abstract also supports the point of my post and not your original. You stated that the patent covers a particular presentation of a UI for doing so. It does not. It just states that a UI is presented and not the form of the UI which is exactly what I stated in my comment.
The claims almost all say "via the user interface." (Not a user interface btw) The figures also contain detailed descriptions of the user interface. I know it's a trope that software patents are bad, but a generally broad patent of "controller for controlling" could have been challenged. The user interface was the main issue with this.
Depends on whether you consider a pair of bluetooth headphones as a single device or multiple devices.
I'm unaware of many devices that output audio to multiple distinct bluetooth targets simultaneously. Bose have that feature as part of their app, but I don't think it's a standard thing as a rule.
What do you mean you are unaware of devices that output audio to distinct bluetooth targets? Any Windows PC can do that, AFAIU. Just connect multiple devices, and every program is free to choose which of them to output to.
Every windows PC, every android, and even things like Pi OS/linux kernel can push to multiple distinct bluetooth targets simultaneously. For android I think it's going on 7 years of that
That’s all an invention really is. At least according to the patent office.
Here’s another example. Wouldn’t it be neat if the tree control in your file browser could have an icon that represents more than 1 file. That idea may or may not have much value. But you better not implement that idea because IBM has a patent on it.
Patents in software rarely meet the bar that most people have of inventions.
unfortunately, the legitimacy of a patent is only determined by contention.
the simple elegance of the following has been lost:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Kinda crappy but i'm sure google has tons of patents on things we would find trivial as well, as far as i'm concerned, let shitty mega corps duke it out.
Not all companies have an aggressive patent strategy. Historically, I believe Google felt negatively about software patents, and had fewer than other tech companies. Eventually they bought a large portfolio of patents (e.g. through the Motorola acquisition; when they later sold Motorola, they kept the patents) so that they could use them defensively, because not having enough patents became a liability.
Even after that, I believe Google only used their patents defensively: they'd only sue company X for patent violations if company X sued Google for patent violations. When I worked there, that was the impression the company gave off, and some initiatives like "Alliance for Open Media" the other commenter mentioned are in line with that.
I don't think Google is unique in this: older tech companies seem to have more aggressive patent strategies, whereas newer (.com era and onward) seem to dislike software patents but are forced to play the game by more aggressive companies and patent trolls. It's a drag on the industry IMO.
The biggest losers are newer and smaller companies, who haven't had enough time or resources to build up a defensive patent portfolio.
> they'd only sue company X for patent violations if company X sued Google for patent violations.
That's still a problem. Suppose company X has a real innovation that is worth billions of dollars and google sues them using "bogus" patents? Most patents suck, but there are some that actually cover real innovation.
> Suppose company X has a real innovation that is worth billions of dollars and google sues them using "bogus" patents?
Bogus patents will be dismissed, eventually. Going to court means commiting to a multiyear-process with no clear outcome if the other party has a hefty patent portfolio (regardless of how you characterize them). The process is quicker and more painful against those without defense,as Google learned when Apple decided to go "Thermonuclear" with patents.
Young companies typically aren’t aggressive on their patents because they are seeking growth. When their growth stalls out that’s when a shift to monetizing their patents occur.
I’m starting to understand the capitalism is cancer arguments. Infinite growth is unsustainable. So inevitably companies that were once great need to use tactics like this to continue their infinite growth trajectory.
I think Sonos proves my point. My understanding is that their growth has stalled out. So, that's why they are shifting to patent licensing. And maybe to your point that's fair assuming their patents are truly innovative inventions that Google is unfairly using.
Google patented swapping out the entropy coder in a video codec, which is already a generic swappable module in practically every codec, for another they didn't invent, arithmetic coding.
That's also a feedback loop though, that exists in part specifically because of how easy and common patent trolling has been. They have to have patents over stupid trivial things because if they don't register these someone else will, and then suddenly it's an even bigger waste of time and money for everyone involved.
There's a reason orgs like the Alliance for Open Media -- a Google-led initiative -- use licensing that explicitly grants you use of the patents owned by member orgs, but also explicitly revoke those if you sue any of them over a patent claim.
> They have to have patents over stupid trivial things because if they don't register these someone else will, and then suddenly it's an even bigger waste of time and money for everyone involved.
It also works as a way to keep incumbents in power. Say Google has 100 important mobile OS patents and Apple has 100 important mobile OS patents. It makes sense for them to cross-license. But a new mobile OS entrant has nothing of interest to Google or Apple and so no way to get access to those important patents.
Exactly. Case in point: Sonos not getting along with Google means the Youtube Music app doesn't allow casting to a Sonos speaker directly (like the Spotify app for example). This means I have to use the Sonos app, which "wraps" the Youtube API, but in a very shitty way (there's lots of contents that I can easily find if I search for it on Youtube directly, but the same search string gives no or bad results if searched in the Sonos app). Not sure if this is just a poor implementation of the YT API by Sonos or more bad will on Google's part (I'm inclined to think it's the first), but either way the user experience is horrible. It's so bad that the Sonos speaker basically sits there unused (even though the sound quality is very good).
I'm not taking Sonos' part here though: like other people here pointed out, I'm pretty sure they patented some very obvious things which they should imo never have gotten a patent for in the first place.
i've begun to believe that customers have no power in first place. The most recent example being how youtube just came in and removed the dislike count, and no one could do anything, not only that i bet youtube usage hasn't gone down. These big companies are so entrenched in our minds at this point that they could essentially do whatever and get away with it.
As far as I know Google are very open that they never use their patents offensively, they just have them as a defence against other companies attacking them with patents. I think that is still true today, can't find any articles about Google suing companies over patents without being sued first.
Now that Googles founders are no longer leading the company that might change, but so far their "do not be evil" still lives on in this regard, at least it did a few years ago.
Ok, one that doesn't have a grid of icons. Are you claiming it's prior art?
I don't think there has been prior art, once you consider all the irrelevant details. There very likely isn't, because if there was, Samsung would have used it.
Looks like a sports car isn’t a specific design. Compare a Bugatti Veyron with a 911 Turbo. They both have lot’s of rounded edges but somehow they are very easy to tell apart as are every brand of hyper car on the market.
This wasn’t two companies that happened to come up with the same design, this was just blatant copying of pointless aesthetic details, which is illegal.
I don't want to get into this old issue but I just noticed that all my notebooks are rectangular with sharp corners regardless of the manufacturer. I mean paper notebooks. It would be silly to patent and sue for that and with the hindsight of 11+ years that was a silly design patent to award. My Samsung from 2019 has rounded corners. I can't even remember how it ended except that some lawyers made a zillion of money out of it.
Whether it's appropriate to use sharp or rounder corners for a given tool is common knowledge dating back thousands of years. In this case it's based on grip, handling, taking it out of a pocket, not piercing that pocket, coexisting with other items in bag, etc.
It was actually the specific curve used that was at issue, but behind that phone designs are not limited to 4 rounded off corners or sharp edges.
Take say the blackberry bold 9930 it’s bottom is a single curve from edge to edge without any flat parts. Considering these phones had a single button at the bottom a curve like that would have simply saved material without compromising screen size and better fit into peoples hands. There are actually a host of odd ruggedized smartphones like: https://www.catphones.com/en-us/cat-s48c-smartphone/ Even for laptops you get a lot of odd edges look at the HP’s Omen X 2S.
Don’t want any of those looks? It’s fine there where plenty of other things they could have done to differentiate these phones like say volume buttons next to the center one, or a back button for web pages etc. It’s only when you copy everything that it’s no longer your style it’s Apple’s.
Net result in the US: The jury trial for damages concluded on May 24, 2018, awarding Apple $539 million, which includes $399 million for damages of Samsung's products sold that infringed on the patents. Germany acted much faster and simply blocked Galaxy 10.1 sales.
That’s because the platonic ideal for a tablet is basically a thin plate of glass with rounded corners.
Hell, even my kindle basically looks like this. My TV looks like this except for the rounded corners (which it doesn’t need because it’s not intended to be held).
Really or is that just what you’re used to? Many people buy cases with corners that protrude thus protecting those flat panels from drops. If anything that seems closer to an ideal design, let alone looking at the ergonomics of how to hold a tablet.
IMO, these designs seem geared to upselling cases rather than anything approaching an ideal.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s approaching the ideal form. It makes complete sense that a device which is at its core just a screen, trends toward being literally nothing but a screen over time. You see the same with other items, including kindles, but also actual books, newspapers, magazines. These are all 100% content edge to edge with the exception of a margin to grip the thing. In 2nd grade we had individual chalk boards and they were literally the shape of an iPad.
The ability to throw a case on it is a feature, not a misdesign. I don’t want a bulky tablet to protect the corners. I’ll put a case on it for that. I happen to not want that so I have a very minimal case on all my devices.
A case over a tablet/phone is always significantly larger and heavier than the equivalent protection built into the device because the case needs attachment points and inherent structural rigidity. It’s not about design just physics.
Every version of the current base/mini/pro model iPad actually has quite a wide bezel in part because people lose so much of the front screen to their cases/hands. https://www.apple.com/ipad-10.2/ You simply can’t comfortably cup them the way you can a phone.
Sure. My case is not larger or heavier than the protection that others might want, though. My kid’s iPad from school is bulky and heavy from the case. Personal iPads in my house are barely heavier than without the cases.
Bezels are wide to accommodate hands, though, not cases. Good cases can obscure nearly none of the bezel.
My case is not larger or heavier than the protection others might want.
An integrated 5-10 grams on a 487 gram iPad could give you a lot of protection. That’s about the point where they should survive a 4 foot drop onto wood/tile/concrete from any angle. I am not saying that’s going to prevent everyone from buying a case, but if close to 80% of the market is buying a case perhaps they could simply make something people would be less concerned about.
It's true that genuine advances often seem trivial after the fact, and it can sometimes be hard to distinguish them. In this case, having one volume control multiple connected speakers is how wired stereos have worked for many decades, so while it might have been state of the art in the 1930s, Sonos wasn't involved.
It's not about the concept, it's about the specific UI they used to do it. However, there are not many ways to represent the concept in a UI, which is where Google is running into a problem.
And Amazon paid a number of talking heads and tech luminaries to help them with the blowback they were getting at the time for such a trivial patent. Scumbags, all.
Look, everyone on this website is going to agree with you that the patents are pretty silly. But that doesn't change the two central facts of the article,
1. Sonos holds such patents
2. Google (the trillion dollar company) is actively making its products worse for users instead of licensing said patents. These are not free products like GMail, these are products that people have paid for, and these are not trivial features, these are features that were actively marketed for the product.
Perhaps we could discuss this, the actually interesting topic, instead of the same boring discussion about the broken US patent system again and again.
Don't feed the [patent] trolls. I used this feature, and will miss it, but would rather Google not give in to abuse of the patent system.
On the otherhand, I will no longer consider Sonos products. Be better Sonos. Bluesound seems like the better alternative that is pushing for innovation over pure profit.
I bet there’s even a patent for “adjust volumes dynamically per speaker based on real-time positional data to increase volume in a balanced way when possible”. If not, I claim this post demonstrates it’s an obvious thing to implement, so long as the user has their phone or another device equipped with mics on them.
Sonos does part of this: when you set up the speaker it sends out pings that are picked up by your phone which you have to wave around like you're doing a cleansing ceremony. To my knowledge it doesn't do this dynamically.
They have quote-unquote "Automatic Trueplay™" for the mobile speakers (Move and Roam), which they say "automatically re-tunes as you play new content and bring your Sonos product to different locations."
I've had BlueSound wireless hifi speakers for some time. Originally the control app was also capable of adjusting speaker volume with the volume buttons on your phone, which I quite enjoyed. It was deprecated (along with the ability to play your iPhone's music library over wifi.. à la airplay) several years ago, presumably due to patent/licensing issues.
The basic problem I see here is that you don't own the speakers you have bought.
My moral point of view is:
I bought the thing so I own it. I must be allowed to understand how it works and I decide what it does. I should be able to change the thing's behavior (if I have the skills) and no one else can do that without my order.
Buying locked black boxes is bad (for the customers). Buying locked black boxes that change their functionality without my consent after I bought them is a so utterly broken system that I don't have words for it.
I was recently looking at the Opal C1. Looks great. $300 is a bit rich, but the kicker was they want $4/month for the software! Now, maybe the camera will function without it? I dunno, I kinda stopped right there and didn't look further because that turned me off.
Ugh. Subscriptions for things that don't require updates or continued support/infrastructure from the vendor drive me crazy.
The Opal C1 is a prime example. It's a webcam. If the feature-set at sale is acceptable to the consumer, there's no additional cost to Opal (no servers to maintain etc) to necessitate a subscription.
It's been posted many times, but it's a good one, so...
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
> there's no additional cost to Opal (no servers to maintain etc) to necessitate a subscription
This is where you might be wrong. I know nothing about the Opal company, but it seems increasingly true that you cannot get VC for a startup without a business model that shows a continuing revenue stream. Business models where the consumer only pays for the product once are dead in the water.
So you may be right that there's no additional cost to Opal, but a subscription might be required by their funders for them to be in business in the first place.
It's still ridiculous and I refuse to buy such products.
Key fobs, cameras, and everything else wrapped up with a subscription service. Appliances built to fail so that you won't mind renting every major purchase in your house. Single family homes being bought up by REITs like Blackrock, so a larger proportion of the population has to rent for life. Endless printing of money to devalue what you have and enrich the architects of the broken system. Useless idiots fighting to empower said architects, entranced by the promise of endless charity bringing them to prosperity.
It is not that simple. If you are willing to shell out more money for "professional" products, you can get products that standalone or you can buy a standalone system (e.g. security cameras with an NVR etc.). What we are getting is a two-tiered society where people with more money have the option to "completely" own their appliances/electronics/homes, while the majority of people cannot afford to do so.
Another thing I’m currently realizing as I’m building my own completely local smart assistant (based on Rhasspy): Those black boxes are a lot cheaper. Just the hardware I need to replace an Echo Dot (and excluding the Pi 4 that does the heavy processing) could buy me 2 - 3 Echo Dots from Amazon.
Rhasspy is amazing! It supports everything I want: central processing with several satellites, multi-language requests (while I want to keep everything English, I also want to request bands not in English), pre-defined commands, fine-tuning.
For the microphone, I want to go with the ReSpeaker mic array in a case [0] for when I need multi-directional far-field recognition (living room, bed room), and probably the often recommended PS2 microphone otherwise (office, kitchen). Speakers will be normal PC stereo speakers in the kitchen, cheapest output I can find for all others (only the kitchen needs to play music while I cook).
rPi 4 will run full Rhasspy (I currently have it on my home assistant pi, I’ll need to see about performance), my old pi3 is running it as a satellite for testing, I want all satellites to be on pi Zero 2 eventually (online discussions say the Zero 1 is too weak for speedy wakeword recognition)
But I still need to do more evaluation and setup before I’m done, currently the satellite can do nothing but turn the office light on and off :D
edit: Just wanted to add that the reason I’m going with a Pi is not some specific love for it, but that it’s the platform I’ll have the easiest time finding support for online ;) It matters less for the processor, so if the Mini-ITX SoC’s I want become available again, and I can build my own NAS, then maybe Rhasspy will just run on that.
That all makes sense. I have an old laptop which I'm currently using as a central server, and I _think_ will be powerful enough to run the server, so my main goal will be figuring out the satellites.
Seems like just getting a pi zero is going to be the first main challenge.
Thank you for your amazing work. Discovering Rhasspy is what made me realize that replacing Alexa with something completely local is actually possibly :)
Agreed wholeheartedly. Google is acting like their hands are tied, and cannot possibly take any other action than to remove a feature from existing devices. If they do, they should be fully liable for fraud, having performed a bait and switch. That the switch happened a significant time after the purchase doesn't change the fact that Google misrepresented the capabilities of the product.
Not intentionally, but they did sell something with a feature, only to remove that feature later.
The issue isn’t that they got sued and have to remove that feature from future speakers. The issue is that they removed the feature from devices they already sold.
In reality, Sonos is not even required to license the ‘technology’ and should they decide to do so, they can ask whatever price they want. Would you suggest there is some legal way to make Google liable for that?
Yes, in the same way that the manufacturer of a physical product may be sued for damages. Suppose I buy a pair of scissors. Fancy new scissors, with some whiz-bang feature that makes them really cool scissors that can cut through anything. Now, the manufacturer is sued for violating a patent, and loses the case. The manufacturer may end up paying a fine to the patent holder. The manufacturer may no longer be allowed to sell those scissors, or to sell repair kits for those scissors. But the manufacturer may not break into my house, take the scissors out of my drawer, and modify them. I've bought them, and the manufacturer no longer has any right to change them.
The problem isn't just that Google removed a feature from an existing product. The problem is also that Google has the ability to do so in the first place.
Well, Google has already infringed on the devices sold. So, yes they are liable for that.
For new devices, Google wouldn’t need to include the same functionality — new customers won’t be expecting the functionality.
What I’m curious about is why they removed the functionality from existing devices. That just opens them up to another lawsuit, this time from customers (for bait and switch). I’m sympathetic… they are in a damned if you do/damned if you don’t situation. And this is probably the cheapest way out.
Google is attempting to mitigate one wrong by performing another. Google is not allowed to implement feature covered by another company's patent. Google is also not allowed to sell a product advertised as having a specific feature and then later remove that feature. The two are independent.
Having lost the lawsuit, Google's proposed remedy is to "undo" the patent infringement by removing the patented feature. This may reduce the harm to Sonos, but actively harms people who purchased the devices.
I don't think it was fraud specifically, but having sold something they weren't allowed to sell, they should refund the customers who are losing the features.
Totally agree - I hate that consumer electronics, now including very expensive products like cars, are black-box with OTA updates that can alter functionality in undesirable ways.
The latest update from Tesla including a significant UI update which many owners are unhappy about. One example I heard was the seat-heat control is now buried one level lower in the menu. Not only is that an annoying change, but potentially has safety ramifications - putting controls in a touchscreen is bad enough, but burying them makes those controls unsafe to use underway.
I agree. But the Apple culture of selling an experience not a product, with a claimed residual ownership of the hardware to prevent you from completely understanding or controlling how it works and what software runs on it, and who can repair it, is being widely replicated now. John Deere. Tesla.
Had this act not existed, had the FTC not had the power to send out nasty grams on behalf of consumers, you'd only be able to put in GM branded motor oil to keep your automobile warranty from being voided. It's going to take a broad right to repair law to stop the trend, and unfortunately I'm not sure we'll get it because tech buys politicians. And the vast majority of consumers really just don't give a shit about understanding technology or repair. They willingly just shell out the cash.
Either I own it or I don't. If you don't want me to tamper with it, then you can't sell it to me. You can give me use of it under some other kind of agreement, but then you can't misrepresent that as a "sale".
While I agree that the owner has every right to modify their own property, I see no reason why you can't buy an item (with full rights) while also agreeing to pay a penalty to the seller if you modify it. That's just a sale combined with a standard performance contract. You would retain the right to make changes—doing so does not infringe on the seller's rights, as they are no longer the owner—but there would be consequences for doing so because of the second part of the contract which you voluntarily agree to as a condition of the sale.
Of course a penalty clause like this is demanding quite a large concession from the buyer, so I would hope people would tend to be reluctant to agree to such terms. It's also not the sort of thing you could easily claim was included in an implied contract without explicit notification and formal consent.
> ...I see no reason why you can't buy an item (with full rights) while also agreeing to pay a penalty to the seller if you modify it.
It's fine to arrange that if that's what both parties want. My argument is simply about the terminology here. If it happens then it's not a sale of goods and the "buyer" doesn't own the goods, either. That's not what "sell" means in the context of goods. It's also not what "own" means.
> If it happens then it's not a sale of goods and the "buyer" doesn't own the goods, either.
In the scenario I described there was a sale of goods and the buyer does own them. The seller certainly doesn't retain ownership; they might be able to sue over breach of contract if you modified the good and refused to follow through with the agreed penalty, but they couldn't reasonably sue you merely for modifying the good without their permission as it doesn't belong to them. It's no different than if you already owned something (so no question about sale/ownership) and then agreed in a contract to pay some amount if you modified it in exchange for some form of consideration. Insurance contracts, for example, usually have terms like this: unapproved DIY modifications to your vehicle can cost you your coverage without entitling you to a refund of your premiums, which amounts to a penalty, and yet it remains your vehicle despite those terms. You can always agree not to do something you otherwise have the right to do as part of a contract. It doesn't fundamentally alter the nature of the sale.
It is not. Merely that there is no "sale of goods" component if the buyer doesn't end up owning the goods, where I define ownership as meaning that there aren't contractual restrictions on what the owner can do with them. This might mean that it's entirely a service by this definition.
Sales can't be for devices that you don't own. Period. If you want to sell services that require specific hardware that you don't want the person to change to their will then make it clear that the device is loaned.
My information comes from asking someone whose company deals with helping people get software patents if it's okay to violate software patents in private.
Now obviously in reality catching you doing this and going after you as a random person is probably not worth it.
You can probably sneak by under the radar/because it is bad PR to go after individuals, but legally you are not able to do that and can be sued. You are probably also not worth the expense of a lawsuit.
> legally you are not able to do that and can be sued
I'm not a lawyer, but I think this depends on jurisdiction. In some jurisdictions, patent law has exceptions for private and/or non-commercial use. UK patent law has such an exception, but US patent law does not.
I'm pretty sure (dueling IANALs!) you can't. This is why patent licenses are such a key piece of OSS packages that you want companies to be able to use.
Define "use". The GPL explicitly allows internal use / modification of software, for example[1]. It's only when you sell / distribute software that includes OSS components that licenses matter.
I can do whatever I want with OSS code and I can modify consumer electronics I've bought any way I want; there is no need to be concerned with licenses and patents. Only if I want to sell my creation do patents matter.
I honestly believe you're wrong here. There's no exclusion for not profiting from your unlicensed use of a patent, you're infringing regardless of how you use it. Whether or not someone will sue you obviously brings into question damages and how they would collect them, but I don't believe infringing behavior is contingent on a monetary exchange.
What if examining the thing you own endangers somebody (including yourself?) should you be allowed to change its behaviors (consider as an example altering your car in an unsafe way)?
As computers are now everywhere and have to do with everything, it is becoming a real political issue to decide if people should be allowed to really modify their computers.
Smartphones most certainly do not allow it. PCs do, but they're from the hobby dominated earlier phase of the technology.
> Buying locked black boxes that change their functionality without my consent after I bought them is a so utterly broken system that I don't have words for it.
I just refer to this as our current situation, and it's going to get worse.
> What if examining the thing you own endangers somebody (including yourself?) should you be allowed to change its behaviors (consider as an example altering your car in an unsafe way)?
Distinguish "allowed" from "able". It's unsafe to drive around with the brake light bulbs removed, but this doesn't mean that auto manufacturers shouldn't let you change your own brake lights.
Distinguish "allowed" from "able". It's unsafe to drive around with the brake light bulbs removed, but this doesn't mean that auto manufacturers shouldn't let you change your own brake lights.
Right. And maybe even more key is that the manufacturer "allowing" that does not alleviate you from liability for any bad thing that happens as a result of you choosing to drive around without brake lights.
There are other ways to cultivate safety, besides manufacturers locking things down and making them an unmodifiable black-box.
> There are other ways to cultivate safety, besides manufacturers locking things down and making them an unmodifiable black-box.
Yes, but they're more difficult and costly; a blackbox is cheap, easy, and when done a certain way, it will increase profits. Why wouldn't companies do this? (I wish I could answer this)
The car example is a terrible example. I only used it because it's a well known example.
But I'm actually thinking about digital computer techonology. In computers the difference between able and allowed works very differently. Specially in software-only contexts (hardware will likely remain hackable).
I'm trying to draw attention to the software-only case (which is also what the article's about).
My nightmare scenario is that by some means, things like web-inpsector tools cease to work, or require a licensed regulated permission to be opened or something.
A technology like WASM, it seems to me, accomplishes a similar goal without trying to do it. The goal of WASM is completely unrelated to restricting inspect-ability, which in turn reduces the ability to modify, yet it manages to do this, it raises the bar for changing webpages.
Wow, only the first of these seems like anything beyond the obvious necessity to synchronize _anything_ (grouping, pairing, synchronizing, settings for a group).
In the pre-Internet days, if company A sold a bunch of products to customers that violated company B's patent, company B could go after company A for money and an injunction against selling more products, but they couldn't send goons to break in to all of the customers' houses to damage the already-sold products. Why is the equivalent okay today?
Because now you agree while signing up to Googles services that Google can and will screw you over with online update at any time it feels like it and you have absolutely no legal expectation that your Google toy will still work tomorrow? Let alone have any of the features you bought it with?
> Because now you agree while signing up to Googles services that Google can and will screw you over
Everyone says this. Unfortunately nobody reads the "contract". That alone means that most users do not fully understand what they're doing. On top of that, Google, and many tech companies, frequently misrepresent what they're offering.
It's probably illegal in most jurisdiction. However, they have lost the case with Sonos and it's more economical/sensical for them to wait for the unlikely event of a class action lawsuit and pay in the more unlikely event of a loss.
In other words, for google to pay damage to Sonos or consumer before having lost to consumer is non-sensical.
because products are sold with an easy to break functionality of the product function added to them.
If it were possible to know where all people lived with the product in the old days, and we had instant cheap teleportation of goons for breaking of products back then it would have just been the way things were done.
You know what, this is bullshit. They are making the customers pay for Google's problems. This is unacceptable, what blame do they have for the IP troubles? Google should pay, if it's deemed to be infringing, but the functionality should stay the same for the customer. Imagine this, someone coming to your house to hobble your product's functionality because another company sued the company you bought the product from.
This is proof of lacking customer protection and leverage.
I think Sonos's case is bullshit anyway, and I think this whole patent environment is ridiculous, but the approach they took to solve it is unethical.
Google doesn't and hasn't ever cared if their approach is ethical. It cares that this approach is legal (sometimes), and profitable (always). Do not expect ethics from big corporations.
Sonos thought they just got a sweet revenue stream on a BS patent. Such a mediocre company (Sonos). I'm not saying they are a patent troll company but they aren't too far. As a user with lots of their tech in my house I'm very unimpressed with their offering - this patent defense seems inline with their mediocre tech.
Far from a Google Booster here but just funny to watch their revenue stream go up in flames - probably will impact my sonos experience (less R&D money to spend). Sorry to users that will be impacted - don't worry Google will come out with a volume adjuster in the near term.
Google participated in industrial espionage while having talks with Sonos, then implemented what they've learned in their products. That's patents working as designed.
Back in 2013, while Google was considering how it could make its music streaming service work on Sonos' speakers, the latter company gave the search giant an inside look at its technology. At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal. Google wasn't making speakers, and it wasn't in the smart home business at all. It would be another year before it bought Nest as a way to get into the hardware business. Sonos says that as a result of that inside look, Google "blatantly and knowingly" copied its technology and included it in its own products.
When the patent case was originally filed Sonos claimed in their press releases that Google even used the same protocol to talk to their speakers that Sonos does. Insinuating that Google stole the protocol. That was actually part of the lawsuit they filed though. The reason why is because the protocols in question are standard UPnP protocols used by most network media devices.
A court hasn't seen any of this yet. It was an ITC commission which takes claims of these types at face value with the assumption that disputes can hit the court system.
In my experience, Sonos hardware is great but their software is woefully bad: slow, buggy junk. But then, the same is true of Apple's stuff: HomePod hardware is very impressive, but Siri and Apple Music are crap.
To be fair to Sonos if I want to use their app (that has terrible user experience) I think it would work 99% of the time. I didn't buy Sonos for their music software - I bought it to use Spotify over my speaker system. I don't use Sonos for music (and never will) I use Spotify (Not Spotify embedded in Sonos app) and its a constant cluster of a time to get it working on more than one speaker. Core functionality to their arguably largest user base.
Is Apple Music really crap? Their UI isn't the slickest but their service, audio quality, and music catalog is top notch. And unlike their Swedish counterparts, they aren't trying to push crappy podcasts on me to up their revenue
It's the UI latency that annoys me. I just opened it on my phone and had to wait 8 seconds before the "Listen Now" screen appeared. Same wait when I click on the "Browse".
Plus lots of irritating UI deficiencies, especially on the Mac version.
Well because of this I’ll never buy another Sonos product, and recommend everyone I know to something else. I wonder if lost revenue from people like me will make up for any gains here.
Sonos didn't develop anything new or novel in this case - they patented something which arguably should not be patentable, which is the ability to adjust the volumes on all speakers at once.
It's rational for companies to patent everything under the sun as a defensive moat, so they don't get themselves trolled, but this is trolling on their part.
If Sonos sat on this patent, that would be fine, but they're trying to troll other companies, it doesn't matter that it's Google and we hate them, it's dumb.
If Google had copied some core special tech that was the result of Sonos R&D that would be a different story.
Yep! I'm aware. Conversely, the AI that runs Google has never halted the shutdown of a product due to public uproar (to my knowledge). It’s nice to know which orgs will flex under public pressure towards consumer utility.
Sonos was going to brick working devices for people who were in the recycling program not quite the same as brick to convince people to upgrade. Not say its much better but not quite as ugly as your suggestion.
What's really frustrating about this situation for me is that Google has given up on audio (discontinued Chromecast Audio, no replacement for Home Max) but as a result of this bullshit, I also can't use my Google products with Sonos, the one 21st century company that is actually doing audio well. Instead, Google's strategy is to partner with a bunch of legacy audio companies (https://www.google.com/chromecast/built-in/audio/) where you just know that the firmware is going to be jank and the products will all eventually be discontinued, and in the long run these companies are dinosaurs and they are all going to die.
I just clicked through to the NAD chromecast amp and instead of giving me a price and a "buy now" button, there is a "find a dealer" button. You have got to be fucking kidding me.
> the one 21st century company that is actually doing audio well
I strongly disagree with this. You don't own your speakers which are completely dependent on manufacturer which can brick them permanently on a whim. Fuck that and fuck Sonos. That is not a definition of 'doing audio well in 21st century' in any meaningful sense.
As for audio quality, there are companies making better sounding products that allow you to do whatever you want with their products and usually for much/at least a bit less.
Play 5s have an aux in on the back, and if you have your music in spotify on your PC you can use the sonos speakers/groups as an output from the desktop app (and maybe with other services too, i just use spotify so i know this one)
Traditional hifi gear is a niche market. In the past this was fine, but the reality is that niche markets won't support the development and maintenance of high quality software that interoperates well with the ever-evolving ecosystem of streaming services and protocols. Sonos is the one company that is playing by the rules of today's market, has actual software developers working for them, and cares about audio quality.
We have a sony SRS-88 wireless home speaker. It's solid. But you can connect all sorts of ways. Airplay worked for a month, now it always sputters. My partner's Spotify seems to start and then send the stream straight to the device, so you can't control it from the original device anymore.
We've found the best way is straight bluetooth, or through the mini stereo plug that we have wired to the back.
and you can have my NAD amp over my dead body, though when I am dead, you can get it with a Slim Devices/Logitech Duet Receiver (Burr/Brown 24 bit DAC), which I'll also take over the current Sonos offerings.
NAD already basically dropped Chromecast support, confirming the suspicion that buying their products would have been a bad idea for me. And any company whose business strategy is to sell to users of the Logitech Duet is going to go bankrupt.
One of the products on that page is already discontinued: Google Music.
I was so bummed when that happened, I loved being able to upload my own music and have Google music update the metadata and allow me to bring it everywhere. Kind of a data hoarder
You can upload your own music to YouTube music, and the music I had previously uploaded to Google music was migrated over at some point (but I think there were manual steps involved, which may no longer be available).
This is interesting from a google perspective. From an active Sonos user (4 speakers throughout the house) - I can say that as a product it seems to be getting better but is pretty tough to work with. It doesn't work well with Spotify unless you use their app (why would I want to add another app thats poorly designed for music) - and getting multiple speakers to work together is hit or miss (how ? It's supposed to be a core feature of the system).
I'm torn as I don't really want to support Google - I also don't support Sonos it is a mediocre product wrapped up in a ton of marketing. In the end I guess I'm neutral.
But Sonos claims Google actually did steal the technology. And the court agrees.
From the article:
Back in 2013, while Google was considering how it could make its music streaming service work on Sonos' speakers, the latter company gave the search giant an inside look at its technology. At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal. Google wasn't making speakers, and it wasn't in the smart home business at all.
It would be another year before it bought Nest as a way to get into the hardware business. Sonos says that as a result of that inside look, Google "blatantly and knowingly" copied its technology and included it in its own products.
The feature is about adjusting the volume of a group of speakers together. That doesn't sound like the kind of thing that you'd need to copy Sonos' source code to implement. Maybe that inside look lead Google to decide to enter the market, but I really doubt the person who wrote the speaker-group volume functionality had ever seen anything from Sonos. If they had they'd be facing copyright infringement lawsuits too.
Ultimately software patents don't really care how something is implemented, just that it has the functionality defined in the patent. So for this ruling it doesn't really matter if Google copied Sonos or not.
Disagreeing with the concepts of software patents doesn’t mitigate Google’s theft of them. Google knew they were stealing patented works when they did so. I don’t own any Sonos or Google products, and I’m still annoyed with Google for knowingly stealing when they could afford to pay.
> But Sonos claims Google actually did steal the technology. And the court agrees.
Could you please point to me where you see the ITC (International Trade Commission) that you call as "court" agreeing to the specific paragraph that you posted? I am not arguing with you, just want to know this better myself.
I mean, it seems like Inc's pretty clear in their position that Google could just pay for the technology they infringed ("The company doesn't want to pay Sonos for technology it copied") rather than backtrack on features they promised their users, and it's a point that stands pretty well on its own without even needing a long article to back it, though this certainly helps their readers with the background behind what's going on.
I'm keen on seeing whether Google ends up on the receiving end of a class action suit for disabling features that were sold to customers and then disabled after the fact.
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.
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.
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.
I really wish there would be some kind of overhaul in patents. Why was a patent for "The technology in question relates to the ability to connect speakers in groups and control their volume." ever granted? That seems like the very first thing you would do when connecting two speakers. Unless this is some kind of ai that tracks where you are and dynamically changes volumes to maintain a surround sound feel or something where is the novelty at?
Came here to say the same thing. I'm the last fan of Google but "the ability to connect speakers in groups and control their volume" is obvious to conceive of and implement to any engineer with sufficient expertise in the field.
It's not obvious at all, for wireless speakers, especially in complex multi-room setups. If it were obvious and easy, then everyone's wireless audio products would handle this as well as Sonos does. But they don't. I bought two Sonos One SLs and had them set up as a stereo pair that my Apple TV could talk to almost instantly. Then recently I got a Sonos Beam soundbar and wanted to use my One SLs as surround speakers. I expected a long, painful setup similar to what I've experienced with competing products. Instead it was seamless, easy, and delightful, and I haven't had to touch or mess with the setup at all since.
There are also a lot of details like how to handle time delays with a large set of wireless speakers so that sound is synced with a TV picture, comparative volume adjustments for a given acoustic, etc.
Did you read the patents or any other reporting on the patents or this case? For instance:
While the implementation of synchronization is not obvious, the concept of doing it is. They shouldn't be able to patent the entire concept of allowing multiple speaker volumes to be adjusted with a single slider (which is what everyone is complaining about), as the implementation of that is trivial.
Maybe that isn't what they've actually done though...maybe Google is keeping their synchronization stuff, but breaking the volume change since Sonos made the mistake of combining them in a single claim. That way Google can avoid violating that claim by not doing the volume part.
Sound engineers and technicians have been controlling speaker group volume for probably a century now. The Sonos patent is more than just an obvious invention. Otherwise the courts would’ve tossed it out.
From the article, I gathered that the patent isn't on the idea of doing so but the specific implementation. In short, Google took the knowledge they gained from the internals of how the Sonos speakers worked and copied that directly. This is a bit different from, say a patent on a virtual shopping cart where it's more the idea than how it's implemented.
All patents are on the specific implementation, but patent attorneys work hard to ensure that the claims in the patent (the only part that matters) cover as broad an area as possible.
Might be good to read the patents before posting this comment. The patents in the suit are far, far more detailed than Inc's throwaway one-line description in this article. Sonos' tech here also involves seamless automatic wireless setup and automatically assessing relative speaker volume for a given space, and all kinds of other things. If you've set up a group of Sonos speakers, versus any of the competitors, you know how much better their tech is.
It's not merely "ability to connect speakers in groups". Inc just did a terrible job here.
These are not "more complex details", it's using more words to say the same thing. It has nothing to do with implementation at all- just a group of speakers playing the same sound source can have their volume adjusted as a group. Given that, I wonder why the court decided that playing a sound on a group of speakers (the first part of your quote) is allowed, but changing the volume across the group is not. It seems quite arbitrary.
If given the typical job of implementing this coarse desire of a spec to 100 engineers and 90 can implement it with no problem then its just work, nothing original about it. This company was only the first to actually want to sell 2+ speakers and implement the app control with it instead of an IR remote.
I've had to set up Sonos equipment in our corporate network (because President gonna President) and frankly I wasn't that impressed. I imagine it works a lot better for home users, but here I had to downgrade WPA3 to WPA2 to get them to see each other on the network, you have to use an IGMP proxy if you want a client to be able to connect from a different VLAN, and things get very confused if you have two different versions set up (because older hardware isn't supported on the newer versions).
Those all sound like things that would be rarely encountered in a typical home installation.
I have a few older Sonos One speakers (the OG version) and the setup was trivial for our use case (background music in kitchen, bedroom, and living room). At the time (~5 years ago), they were the clear market leader, both in audio quality and ease-of-use.
I did consider swapping them out for the first HomePod, but price put me off. Apple has since discontinued in favor of the Mini - I need to check them out and see if the audio quality is remotely comparable before making any change.
I agree with you about this part. I do general IT support and have had to set up one of my clients with a large number of Sonos speakers in their office. It was a pain and the tech doesn't seem to be as good of a match for corporate networks.
The synchronization of multiple zones is definitely non-trivial. Many years ago I had a few Apple Airport Expresses which had audio out. In theory you could use Airplay with these to do much the same thing as Sonos for a lot cheaper. In a one-bedroom apartment, we have 3 zones (bedroom, living room, kitchen) which are all close enough that there's a lot of opportunities to hear sound from 2 or 3 systems at the same time. With Apple it was never in sync. Small delays make the sound miserable. I finally bit the bullet and bought 3 Sonos units. They just work when it comes to the sync.
There are other aspects which made Sonos far superior to just using Apple's Airplay and iTunes, but those are not covered in the patents in question.
My assumption is that if getting 3 devices to stay in sync - with what I assume is UDP streams and WiFi latency hiccups - was easy or even somewhat difficult, Apple would have been able to solve it. But they couldn't. There must be some special sauce here that Sonos developed and patented.
If the patent didn't cover adjusting the volume for a group of speakers, why did Google have to disable it? While the patent portfolio did include other things, Google is being forced to disable the basic, obvious feature.
Google is not being forced to disable this feature, Google decided to. They could have paid royalties to Sonos for implementing the feature like they did, after all.
I know there was "more to it", but this claim of the patent could have been invalidated. It seems like the court's interpretation is that Sonos owns the entire process of grouping speakers and changing the volume for that group, which is a very obvious claim.
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We can't find the page you're looking for.
I would not say anything if it said "blocked for your IP/country", but it appears there is nothing any more behind that link. Was the article removed?
EDIT: Ad-blocker (uBlock Origin) off and the page loads. I should have thought of that, there was a flicker of something else before the "not found". Still very strange to show a "404 Not Found" in retaliation for an ad-blocker instead of complaining about the latter.
I hope Google goes nuclear on Sonos with their ridiculously huge patent portfolio just to show everyone just how petty and stupid the patent infringement system is.
Linus Tech Tips has a current video showing this kind if patent "non-obvious"-ness was broken long before the "with a computer" age. A mechanical calculator had to split the "divide" button into two buttons because another company had a patent on a "single button division" patent.
For companies in Google's situation, a common tactic is to stop infringing ASAP and then find a workaround. Since patents are typically for mechanisms rather than features, Google might be able to implement a roundabout mechanism to achieve the same goal.
> Back in 2013, while Google was considering how it could make its music streaming service work on Sonos's speakers, the latter company gave the search giant an inside look at its technology. At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal. Google wasn't making speakers, and it wasn't in the smart home business at all.
I find it really sad that Sonos resorted to this. In my mind, this means it is struggling to find it's place in a market that now includes all the big names.
I own a Sonos play:5, a couple Nest Hubs and some Amazon echoes, and even to this day, in terms of sound quality, nothing beats the play:5.
I wonder if Sonos has gone after Apple as well for this trivial patent.
Or does the consumer have any recourse with Google? I suspect not in the USA, but maybe in the EU (assuming Google rolls this feature removal out globally)?
There's a reason Google operates an entire stack for completely encrypted end-to-end communication to Google datacenters, including now encrypted DNS. Essentially anything connected to the Internet, Google can establish a completely unblockable communication with directly, provided you intend to allow it to connect to Google servers at all.
The main reason I (literally) threw my Nest thermostat in the trash was that Nest (Google) kept installing updates I couldn't veto, and without exception every update made the device worse. I disabled the wifi for a while but of course then I could no longer control the thermostat with my phone, so eventually I just replaced it with a dumb thermostat and I've not bought a Nest product since.
I mean, it sounds like a stupid patent, but if the court says so then it’s valid. We either live with the rule of law or we don’t. Also, we need to fix IP law, but I digress.
But… wtf Google? Do you have some kind of “we don’t negotiate with people we stole from” ultimatum, or are you just trying to piss off the people that bought into your dystopian nightmare buttons?
In terms of what's available in an mass market electronics store, sure. Is it best in class compared to a receiver set up with casting and $2,000 speakers? No, but that's not the problem Sonos is trying to solve.
I hope there's no patents for EQ settings. It took Sonos 3 years to finally add EQ to the play screen in the app. I'd hate for that to disappear because someone had the idea for: "group of sliders that cut a specific range of frequencies to improve sound quality".
I'm no fan of Google as a company, but it really sucks how patents are still being abused to the detriment of the average person. I wonder what the likelihood of retaliation is, since I'm sure Google has a much deeper patent catalog they could weaponize.
"technology"
yeah, like one control to adjust the volume on MORE THAN A SINGLE SPEAKER AT A TIME.. I think that feature is also on.. every single piece of audio equipment I've ever owned.. making it wireless is not even an innovation.
I have 10 nest mini speakers in my home, in various speaker groups. My main use cases are broken, because so many different apps play at wildly different volumes. I want to box them up, ship them to google, and get my money back. How do I do this?
There is technically nothing stopping you from sending them to a Google office... you have their address. But there is no way they will give you your money back.
This seems like it could lower the likelihood of future patent troll lawsuits against Google. They've established here that they are willing to just remove features instead of paying royalties.
Sonos no doubt lost a lot of money on this lawsuit.
Boycott Sonos! I am not a fan of Google, but sometimes I don't get how companies like Sonos get patents on stuff that's not really an invention - it's called "common sense"!
They indeed are. Google search shows vastly worst results than what it’s engine is capable. This is a deep learning trick to train the search models better and better
Mine's primarily used for intercom, messaging, and simple weather updates, where its main achievement is intercepting audio requests where it tries to answer things I want to do with my phone and thus blocks my phone from providing useful functionality. "I'm sorry I don't know how to do that" yes but my phone does so shut up and get out of the way.
Multi-room music playing isn't something I've attempted. Do you have the speakers grouped together or keep them ungrouped? Does it do a good job of keeping them in sync? Because my biggest disappointments are generally in the poor coordination between the devices on the network not knowing which should handle a request - often I'll be right next to a speaker and make a request, and the one in the next room will reply, bewilderingly.
I have several google minis, and a couple of google hubs (first gen). You need to group the devices and then tell google to play the songs in that group... it has worked really well for me - so I'm hoping I won't lose that functionality. If they are too close together the speakers struggle to figure out which one is closer to me . For instance, I used to have one in the living room and one in the kitchen (rooms that are close together without a separating wall) and often they will both answer my question. I ended up turning off the mic in one of them.
Every now and then I use it as an intercom but with mixed results.
My take on the google products is that they are far from perfect, but I really don't see anything better out there. I own several Apple products, but when it comes to smart home they have very little to offer, and Siri is far behind the google assistant.
I remember iPhone 4s (s is for speed). You'd buy one, and then Apple would "upgrade it" via software update removing the s. Which was the thing you bought it for.
this is patent trolling, stuff getting patented is control volume on speakers, swipe on mobile app, double tap to open something... completely obvious non-sense.
One way around those bullshit patents is to let users program/script their devices, or install whatever software they want.
Also, with good enough AIs we could work around many patents!
Users could simply explain the AIs what they want them to do. Even if the action they teach infringe on a patent, nobody would be able to sue them.
Not here to defend Google, but how can something trivial like that even be patentable?