Google is suing Sonos (again) over patent infringement in what seems to be an unending legal fight series between two tech companies. The two new lawsuits filed Monday center around various patents involving keyword detection, charging using “technologies invented by Google” and determining what speaker from a group should respond to the keyword.
A post from Bloomberg Law noted that both these lawsuits were filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The report said that Google accused Sonos products — like the Sonos One, Arc, Beam, Move and Roam — of violating seven patents.
“Rather than compete on the basis of innovation and product quality, Sonos has decided to compete in the courtroom, and started an aggressive and misleading campaign against our products, at the expense of our shared customers. We prefer innovation to litigation but their actions leave us no choice but to defend our technology and challenge Sonos’s clear, continued infringement of our patents,” José Castañeda, Google Spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement.
The search giant also plans to take these complaints to the US International Trade Commission in the coming days, Castañeda added. The company will ask the commission to impose a ban on the import of any products that are found infringing the above-mentioned patents.
Google and Sonos have been at loggerheads about wireless speaker tech patents for a while now. The latter got a big win earlier this year when the US Trade Commission said Google had infringed on patents related to casting and group speaker controls. The Mountain View-based company had to remove some functionality like a single group volume control for a set of speakers from its offerings.
Last week, a California judge sided with Google by canceling a Sonos patent related to transferring the playback queue of tracks from one speaker to another.
We’ve reached out to Sonos and will update the story with a comment when we hear back.
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