Google Ordered to Pay $32.5M to Sonos over Speaker Patent Infringement
San Francisco Jury Rules in Favor of Santa Barbara–Based Company Sonos in One Out of Two Patent Lawsuits
Santa Barbara–based speaker and audio system manufacturer Sonos was awarded $32.5 million in a lawsuit against Google’s parent company, Alphabet, after a San Francisco jury found that Google had infringed on Sonos’s speaker patent.
Sonos has been involved in several legal battles with Google dating back to January 2020, when Sonos filed a patent infringement case with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), targeting the tech giant over its Google Home and Nest Audio line. The ITC would later rule in favor of Sonos, leading to an import ban on several Google devices, and in response Google decided to strip the functionality of some of its at-home products.
Google then filed a separate lawsuit against Sonos in 2022 over voice-control technology, adding fuel to the feud between the two companies. While Sonos has been recognized as the originator of the wirelessly connected speaker concept, it has focused solely on the speaker technology and application throughout its history and is a relatively smaller company, with a $2 billion market cap compared to Google’s $1.5 trillion.
The two companies were originally collaborators as well. In 2013, Google agreed to implement Google Play Music support for Sonos speakers, but the relationship turned sour when, according to Sonos’s court claims, Google used the access to the Sonos platform to “blatantly and knowingly” copy some of the features used in Google’s home speaker released later in 2016.
The most recent ruling was focused on Sonos’s claims that Google had infringed on both its speaker and home app patents. While the San Francisco jury found that Google had not infringed on the home app patent, the court ruled that Google had, in fact, infringed upon Sonos’s speaker patent, ordering the company to pay a total of $32.5 million. (The court ruled that Google would pay $2.30 in royalties for each of the more than 14 million speakers sold that infringed upon Sonos’s patent.)
While the split decision is a financial win for Sonos, the $30 million is a drop in the bucket for Google, which reported a net profit of $58.6 billion last year. Originally, Sonos had pursued financial damages of up to $3 billion, before the court whittled that figure down to a claim of $90 million, which ultimately was cut to the final figure of just more than $30 million.
