In a significant ruling, the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has said that Google violated five patents of the high-tech speaker and audio technology company Sonos, relating to smart speakers.
A US judge had ruled in August last year that Google infringed upon the Sonos patents.
"We appreciate that the ITC has definitively validated the five Sonos patents at issue in this case and ruled unequivocally that Google infringes on all five. That is an across-the-board win that is surpassingly rare in patent cases and underscores the strength of Sonos's extensive patent portfolio and the hollowness of Google's denials of copying," Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said in a statement late on Thursday.
In January 2020, Sonos sued tech giant Google for allegedly copying its wireless speaker design, urging the ITC to ban Google products like laptops, phones, and speakers.
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence testified before the US House antitrust committee that Google "blocked the company from enabling both Amazon's Alexa assistant and the Google Assistant from being active at the same time".
In a statement to The Verge, Google said that "We do not expect any impact to our ability to import or sell our products".
According to Lazarus, the Sonos patents "cover Sonos' groundbreaking invention of extremely popular home audio features, including the set up for controlling home audio systems, the synchronization of multiple speakers, the independent volume control of different speakers, and the stereo pairing of speakers"
According to Sonos, starting in 2016 shortly after the first Google Home was launched, it began warning Google about patent infringement but to no avail.
Sonos said it accused Google of infringing on a total of 100 patents.
Google even countersued audio company Sonos for patent infringement, alleging that the tech giant contributed "substantial Google engineering resources" to help Sonos in the past.
Google has always maintained that its technology was developed independently and it was not copied from Sonos.
American technology company Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. The company, which started as an online search engine, now also offers internet services, enterprise solutions, smartphones, tablets, notebooks, smart speakers, virtual reality headsets, artificial intelligence, maps and navigation services, etc.
Google was originally planned to be named googol, a mathematical term for the numerical digit 1 followed by 100 zeroes (10100). The name Google was the result of a misspelling. So, the word had no meaning at the time the company was formed. Today, however, the company’s name has become synonymous with a web search and several dictionaries have even included Googling as a verb meaning searching on the internet — to use the Google search engine for obtaining information about (someone or something) on the World Wide Web.
In the year of incorporation, Google received its first outside financing from Sun Microsystem co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. By 1999, the company had been processing half a million queries every day and received around $25 million through venture capital funding. The company started to grow exponentially in 2000, when Google became the default search engine for Yahoo! Later, Yahoo! and Google parted ways in 2004, but the latter continued growing and its daily recorded searches hit 200 million.
In 2015, Google was reorganized and made a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc. After becoming a subsidiary, Google’s charge was handed over to its senior vice-president of products Sundar Pichai, who is now the CEO of the company. The company’s co-founders, Page and Brin became the CEO and president of Alphabet, respectively.
Google.com is now the most visited website in the world. The company’s several other offerings, including YouTube and Blogger, also figure among the top 100 most visited websites globally. Since 2007, Google has also been one of the top five most valuable brands in the world, according to a report released by London-based data analytics and insights firm Kantar in 2019.
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