Google is suing Sonos (again) for patent infringement in what seems like a never-ending series of legal battles between two tech companies. The two new lawsuits filed Monday center around various patents involving keyword detection, billing using “technologies invented by Google” and determining which speaker in a group should respond to a keyword.
A publication from Bloomberg Law noted that both cases were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The report says Google accuses Sonos products — such as the Sonos One, Arc, Beam, Move and Roam — of infringing seven patents.
“Instead of competing on the basis of product innovation and quality, Sonos decided to compete in the courtroom and launched an aggressive and misleading campaign against our products at the expense of our shared customers.” We prefer innovation to litigation, but their actions leave us with no choice but to protect our technology and challenge Sonos’ clear, ongoing infringement of our patents,” Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement to TechCrunch.
The search giant also plans to take those complaints to the US International Trade Commission in the coming days, Castaneda added. The company will ask the commission to impose a ban on the importation of products found to infringe the aforementioned patents.
The search giant’s court document, seen by TechCrunch, takes aim at the recently unveiled Sonos voice assistant, saying that Google has patents to “enable voice assistant technology and provide improvements to the performance, reliability and durability of voice-enabled devices.” control and battery-powered,” and Sonos used them without his permission.
“For example, Sonos recently introduced its Sonos Voice Control feature to control its products in an energy-efficient way through the use of ‘hot words’ and to manage the battery charging of its products using technologies invented by Google,” says the him.
In response, Sonos said it was Google’s arm-twisting tactic against the Santa Barbara-based smart speaker company over criticism of the search giant’s monopolistic methods.
“Previously, Google sued us all over the world and Sonos prevailed in every case settled. In contrast, courts have repeatedly upheld Sonos’ claims that Google infringes on its core patented smart speaker technology. Google’s new lawsuits are a scare tactic designed to retaliate against Sonos for speaking out against Google’s monopolistic practices, avoid paying Sonos fair royalties for the approximately 200 patents it currently infringes, and destroy smaller a competitor whose innovations he appropriated. It’s not going to work,” Eddie Lazarus, Sonos’ chief legal officer, said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Google and Sonos have been at loggerheads over patents for wireless speaker technology for some time. The latter scored a major victory earlier this year when the US Trade Commission said Google infringed on patents related to group speaker casting and control. The Mountain View-based company had to remove some functionality from its offerings, such as a single group volume control for a set of speakers.
Last week, a California judge sided with Google, invalidating a Sonos patent related to transferring the queue for playing songs from one speaker to another.
The story has been updated with Sonos’ response.
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