International Tax Panorama

Sonos Inc and Alphabet’s Google LLC will face off in a San Francisco federal trial on Monday over claims that Google copied Sonos’ patented smart-speaker technology in wireless audio devices like Google Home and Chromecast Audio.

The case is part of a sprawling intellectual property dispute between the former business partners that includes other lawsuits in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Sonos has asked the court for $90 million in damages from Google in the San Francisco case, down from $3 billion after U.S. District Judge William Alsup narrowed the case, according to a Google court filing. 

About the Allegation: 

In 2020, Santa Barbara-based Sonos sued Google for patent infringement, accusing it of infringing five Sonos patents related to speaker features.

Almost a decade after Sonos created the smart-speaker market, Google entered the space. Initially, Google sought to work with Sonos and, through those efforts, gained access to Sonos’s engineers, products, and technology.

The speaker manufacturer accused Google of developing and selling products that copied Sonos’s technology.

The pair worked with Google in late 2011 to integrate the Google Play Music service into the Sonos ecosystem. This led to the launch of Google Play Music on the Sonos platform in 2014.

However, in 2015, Google started “willfully infringing Sonos’s patents,” leading to the launch of Chromecast Audio, Sonos said in its lawsuit.

In 2019, Sonos added Google Assistant support to its app. At the time, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence called the integration “a major milestone for the industry,” adding that the company is committed to having multiple voice assistants on its app “as soon as possible”.

But in its lawsuit filed in 2020, Sonos claimed that Google’s misappropriation of its patented technology proliferated in 2015 when the tech giant expanded its wireless multi-room audio system to more than a dozen infringing products including the  Google Home Mini, Google Home, Google Home Max, and Pixel phones, tablets, and laptops.

What Sonos is demanding? 

Sonos has asked the court for $90 million in damages from Google in the San Francisco case, down from $3 billion after U.S. District Judge William Alsup narrowed the case, according to a Google court filing. 

Sonos is seeking a ban on sales of Google’s speakers, smartphones and laptops in the US. By 2021, the Royal Bank of Canada estimated that Google sold over 100 million Google Home devices in the US alone, generating more than $8 billion in revenue.

Outcome of Previous disputes

US District Judge William Alsup invalidated one of the patents that Sonos accused Google of infringing. Alsup ruled that Google did not infringe on one of the patents. 

However, he rejected Google’s request to cancel the other two patents before the trial on May 8. 

AlsoSonos won a limited import ban on some Google devices from the US International Trade Commission (ITC) last year, while Google sued Sonos for patent infringement at the ITC and in California.