10/25/2023
The new ruling in Sonos’ lawsuit against Google does not look good for Sonos. A jury previously voted in favor of Sonos, awarding the brand $32.5 million in damages. Most recently, though, US District Judge William Alsup dismissed the $32.5 million verdict and condemned Sonos for misusing the patent legal framework.
According to the Judge, the patents that Sonos tried to assert were unenforceable. The company tried to tie a 2019 patent application to a provisional patent filed 13 years beforehand, in 2006. Sonos claimed its multi-room audio technology preceded Google’s, forcing a link to the new technology with its provisional patent. However, Google’s technology was underway before the 2019 patents were.
Judge Alsup said summarizes the case,
“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. By the time these patents issued in 2019 and 2020, the industry had already marched on and put the claimed invention into practice.”
In the end, the 2019 patents were deemed invalid.
Read the case: Sonos Inc v. Google LLC, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:20-cv-06754.
