Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google has won its battle against audio products maker Sonos Inc. SONO. It's not just Google that has won, though – if you have a Nest or Google speaker, it's a win for you, too.
What Happened: A United States federal judge ruled in favor of Google in a patent dispute initiated by Sonos in 2020. Sonos had accused Google of violating more than 200 of its patents centered around multi-room listening technology.
However, the case was narrowed down to five patents. Despite losing the initial trial by jury, Google managed to overturn the decision in the federal courts. This ruling makes Sonos’ patent case ineffective as two of their patents were dismissed during the federal hearing.
Halimah DeLaine Prado, General Counsel at Google, applauded the victory in a blog post and took issue with Sonos’ approach.
Prado quoted direct remarks from the court, where Judge William Alsup asserted that Sonos was not a trailblazer leading the industry toward something novel but instead was “an inventor coming out of the woodwork to say that he had come up with the idea first”.
Why It Matters: While this is a win for Google, it is also good news for owners of Nest and Google speakers. Following the Sonos lawsuit, Google disabled the multi-room speaker pairing feature that allowed users to stream the same music in different rooms or locations in their houses.
However, this will now be enabled again. Google is expected to roll out an update in the next 48 hours to the Google Home app for iOS and Android devices.
Image credits – Shutterstock
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