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4 March 2020PatentsRory O'Neill

Google slams Sonos over ‘revisionist’ patent claims

Google has hit back at what it calls home audio company Sonos’ “revisionist history” in a patent suit over Chromecast and Google Home.

In January, the smart speaker manufacturer accused Google of “ flooding the market” with loss-leading products that copied Sonos’ patented technology.

According to Sonos, Google gained access to the tech when collaborating with Sonos to integrate its Google Play Music service with Sonos home speakers.

In a response filed earlier this week at the US District Court for the Central District of California, Google said that “Sonos’s complaint uses revisionist history to attack Google’s innovative software and hardware products”.

“Google did not obtain ‘deep’ access to Sonos technology and then develop the Google products at issue; in fact, Google launched Chromecast before Google and Sonos ever agreed to collaborate,” the complaint added.

According to Google, Sonos asked for its assistance in integrating the two company’s products in 2013 and 2016.

“Sonos seems to think no good deed should go unpunished. In exchange for the assistance Sonos received from Google to help improve Sonos’s products, Sonos now sues Google asking for damages and an injunction,” the Google filing said.

Google also claimed that the five patents asserted by Sonos were “obvious and dated” by the time the applications were filed.

“The five asserted patents describe older technologies–not the advanced technologies Google uses,” the company claimed.

The US International Trade Commission last month launched an investigation into Sonos’ claims against Google.

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More on this story

Patents
12 June 2020   Five months after home speaker maker Sonos accused Google of copying its technology and “flooding the market” with cheap, infringing products, Google has hit back with a countersuit.
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10 January 2022   The US International Trade Commission has handed a victory to Sonos, after it barred Alphabet’s Google from importing some smart home devices and audio systems produced in China into the US.
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24 July 2023   The case involves technology allowing for the ‘casting’ of video-finding content on one screen and watching it on another | Tech first developed for community college e-learning courses more than a decade ago.