The legal saga between Google & Sonos continues this week, with the search tech giant firing a lawsuit back at the audio technology company for patent infringement.
The last lawsuit result in this frenetic legal sequence helped strip some of the functions away from Google peripherals as they themselves infringed on patents as described back in 2021. Chief Legal Officer, Eddie Lazarus said then “Google has thrown everything at us in this case, but we believe that the evidence before the ITC demonstrates Google to be a serial infringer of Sonos’ valid patents and that the ITC case represents just the tip of the iceberg,” regarding the ordeal.
In a turn of events today, Google proved Lazarus’ statement of tip of the iceberg correct, by loading up a wealth of patent lawsuits of their own design and hitting Sonos back with force. A spokesperson from Google, José Castañeda stated the legal battles to come were to “defend our technology and challenge Sonos’s clear, continued infringement of our patents,” according to The Verge. The legal cases cite seven additional patents Sonos allegedly violated, including wireless charging and boolean search term detection.
Eddie Lazarus speaking on Sonos’ behalf regarded the new litigation as an “intimidation tactic” borne of retaliation against the prior verdict that saw functions removed from speakers against the house that built the Pixel. Functions that include changing the volume on a group of speakers at once using a smart device.
The newly conceived lawsuits are to be filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, with plans to later file similar lawsuits with the US International Trade Commission which would seek to ban the allegedly patent-infringed products Sonos imports Castañeda told The Verge.
Although there seems to be no end in sight for this legal battle, consumers will just have to wait and see how this one plays out.
