Patent dispute leads to trade commission complaint, federal suit against Google

Electronics manufacturer Sonos asked the International Trade Commission on Tuesday to investigate Google and sued it in federal court, alleging patent infringement.

Clement S. Roberts of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP sent a letter to the trade commission requesting it conduct an investigation under Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended, regarding audio players, controllers and components thereof, and products containing them. The filing sought an order from the agency that would bar Google or any of its associated companies from selling or marketing any products that infringe Sonos’ patents.

The proposed respondents are Google LLC and its parent company, Alphabet Inc. in Mountain View.

The docket on the commission’s website contains no further details, and a spokesperson for Orrick said it would not provide comment on either complaint filed on behalf of Sonos, based in Santa Barbara.

Roberts and Alyssa Caridis, also of Orrick, also filed the patent infringement suit Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles, alleging Google stole Sonos’ patents for a wireless speaker system the two companies had collaborated on.

“Over the years, we have had numerous ongoing conversations with Sonos about both companies’ IP rights and we are disappointed that Sonos brought these lawsuits instead of continuing negotiations in good faith. We dispute these claims and will defend them vigorously,” said Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda in an emailed statement.

The complaint said that as early as 2013 “Google gained knowledge of Sonos’s patented multiroom technology through a partnership with Sonos to integrate Google Play Music into the Sonos platform. However, just two years later in 2015, Google began willfully infringing Sonos’s patents when it launched its first wireless multi-room audio product — Chromecast Audio.”

Sonos Inc. v. Google LLC, 2:20-cv-00169 (C.D. Cal. Filed Jan. 7, 2020).

The alleged theft, the complaint said, was compounded by Google’s strategy of using its own multi-room audio products to “vacuum up invaluable consumer data from users and, thus further entrench the Google platform among its users and ultimately fuel its dominant advertising and search platforms.”

The lawsuit, which covers five patents on Sonos’ wireless-speaker design, claims to have raised the issue of patent infringement with Google beginning in August 2016.

In October 2016, Sonos said it put the tech giant on notice of infringement of 28 patents, gradually increasing these notices leading up to a February 2019 notice that Google had violated 100 of its patents.

The suit arrives at Google’s doorstep as the company is facing increased public scrutiny from federal antitrust regulators, including an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department.

The lawsuit claims the copyright infringement is a small aspect of Google’s wrongdoing, accusing Google of discounting its products, allegedly derived from Sonos’ existing design, to operate in new markets as a “loss leader.” The suit alleges this allowed Google to essentially use the built-in discount of no intellectual property development costs to then offer a heavy discount at point of sale in order to more easily carve out a larger number of buyers.

“Google’s copying of Sonos’s patented inventions has helped and/or will help Google generate significant revenue from the use of Google’s hardware devices including advertising, data collection, and search via the Google Wireless Audio Systems,” said the complaint.

It quotes a New York Post article saying, “Amazon and Google both discounted their home speakers so deeply over the holidays that they likely lost a few dollars per unit ... hoping to lock in customers and profit from later sales of goods and data about buying habits.”