US judge tosses out $32.5 mn verdict against Google in Sonos case

San Francisco, Oct 11 A US judge has tossed out an earlier $32.5 million verdict against Google in a long-running legal battle with high-tech audio technology company Sonos.

In May this year, a court in the US had ordered Google to pay $32.5 million to Sonos, for infringing on the company's smart speaker patent.

In the latest decision, US District Judge William Alsup said that Sonos had wrongfully linked its patent applications for multi-room audio technology to a 2006 application, in order to make them appear older and claim that its inventions came before Google’s products.

“Sonos filed the provisional application from which the patents in suit claim priority in 2006, but it did not file the applications for these patents and present the asserted claims for examination until 2019,” the decision read.

“In fact, in 2014, five years before Sonos filed the applications and presented the claims, accused infringer Google LLC shared with Sonos a plan for a product that would practice what would become the claimed invention,” the decision added.

“Google then began introducing its own products that practiced the invention in 2015. Even so, Sonos waited until 2019 to pursue claims on the invention (and until 2020 to roll out the invention in its own product line),” it further read.

Sonos called the ruling “wrong on both the facts and the law” and a “temporary setback”.

Google said in a statement late on Tuesday that Sonos has been running a years-long, misleading campaign against helpful features in the Google Home devices and smart speaker devices on spurious patent grounds.

“A federal judge ruled firmly in favour of our products, rejecting two of Sonos’ patents, building on previous rulings that invalidated the asserted claims from another two of Sonos’ patents. The decision shows the weakness of a central plank of Sonos’ campaign,” said Halimah DeLaine Prado, General Counsel at Google.

The court stated that Sonos’ patents are both invalid -- meaning they never should have been granted in the first place -- and unenforceable, and affirmed that we developed the technology first and independently.

“This decision is good news for our users who will once again be able to seamlessly group and integrate Google smart speakers, and for continued innovation of new features across the industry,” said Google.