Google countersues Sonos, citing patent infringement

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Google fights back against Sonos and countersues the company for patent infringement. The tech giant claims Sonos is infringing five Google patents that involve mesh networking, echo cancellation, DRM, content notifications, and personalized search. Sonos initially filed a patent lawsuit against Google in January. This ongoing row has already resorted to a US International Trade Commission investigation.

The Verge says the lawsuit serves a couple of purposes: one is to countersue Sonos, and another is for the tech giant to show that it feels aggrieved after assisting Sonos with its product development.

"While Google rarely sues other companies for patent infringement, it must assert its intellectual property rights here," the company says in its lawsuit.

Google is saying in its complaint how it devoted "substantial Google engineering resources" to assist Sonos, that the company is a partner receiving special treatment.

"Google is proud of its more than five-year partnership with Sonos, and has worked constructively with Sonos to make the companies' products work seamlessly by building special integrations for Sonos," the complaint reads. "For instance, when Google rolled out the ability to set a Sonos speaker as the default option for Google Assistant, it was the first time Google had done that for any partner company."

On the other hand, Sonos lawsuit claims Google infringed five patents, which include covering the setup, control, and synchronization of multiroom network speaker systems. That the tech giant stole these technologies while working on bringing Google Play Music to its products. And that the company insisted on stringent terms for Sonos to integrate Google Assistant into its products. Sonos said it had to share its full product roadmap for six months, even as Google developed competing speaker products.

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence testified before the US House Antitrust Committee, claiming Google blocked his company's ability to allow both Amazon's Alexa assistant and Google Assistant to be available on their products at the same time.

Spence said Google was practicing "efficient infringement," which is a gamble that the profits of dominating a market will outweigh the cost of patent lawsuits. He said Google deeply undercut prices to push out competition and fuel its strategy of getting more user data to improve its advertising and search services.

And with this countersuit, Spence said in a statement that Google is using "their size and breadth to try and find areas in which they can retaliate." And that instead of paying what it owes, Google "turned to strong-arm tactics the robber barons of old would have applauded."

Source: Reuters