git revert revert-me-if-sonos-tossedGoogle can clone the Sonos hardware and kick Sonos off of YouTube Music. Which is exactly what they tried doing before.
Patents should benefit small companies with actual products in the market. The world shouldn't revolve around five tech giants.
Which would be great, except as the ruling states, Sonos didn't introduce the feature in the market until 5 years after Google did:
> The essence of this order is that the patents issued after an unreasonable, inexcusable, and prejudicial delay of over thirteen years by the patent holder, Sonos, Inc. Sonos filed the provisional application from which the patents in suit claim priority in 2006...Google then began introducing its own products that practiced the invention in 2015. Even so, Sonos waited until 2019 to pursue claims on the invention (and until 2020 to roll out the invention in its own product line).
Patents as a whole is entirely negative force. The original thought to make the inventor be able to profit off the invention is long gone. Near every single one is corporate backed and used to stem the competition
To protect giant companies against small startups that are trying with all of their might? I'm not so sure.
In this case, Google can now clone Sonos' hardware and synchronized play algorithms and block Sonos from accessing YouTube Music.
I'm tired of Google, Apple, and Meta winning by default. They have unlimited resources to clone startups' entire products.
Big companies should be way more vulnerable to disruption.
Startups aren't trying to compete with large companies, they're trying to get bought up by them. If your goal is to compete, patents are a nice-to-have, but you can still compete on being more flexible than a giant lumbering tech company. The whole mythology of "disruption" depends on it, because there are natural diseconomies of scale. When you get big, you get stupid.
If your goal is acquisition, however, then patents are entirely necessary, because otherwise - what are tech companies buying?
In this case, Google should be allowed to clone the shit out of Sonos, and Sonos should have legally mandated access to the YouTube Music accounts of any user who consents to Sonos products accessing their data. Interoperability is far more important to startups that are actually trying to remain independent rather than providing a nice juicy VC exit. With the current state of "IP"[0], any startup trying to build an interoperable product is at the mercy of their competitors who can kill the API keys of products they are cloning.
I'd rather live in the world where big tech is at constant risk of being scraped to death than the world where the only thing startups can bring to the table are poorly-worded and overbroad patents that big tech can use to kill other startups.
[0] Read: laws that let you opt out of having competitors. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) falls under this umbrella.
In any case, startups aren't exactly in a position to gamble away their endowment in a court battle, which can trivially get stretched out by their megacorp opponents until they run out of cash.
They ain't doing it now either.
I think more useful model might be shortening it (5 years for anything but medical and such ought to be enough to monetize most) and enforcing profit share into patent law itself.
say 20% of the revenue on the product divided to the owners of patent used (excluding subsidiares and other related entities of company using patent).
Then the original "inventor" (as joke as it is in software...) gets not only the money but also good profit margin advantage over big corp to market
how did you come to this outcome, that Google could and would do this?
I feel it is almost unworkable enough
I don’t feel as if enough important people care enough the same way as irrelevant people would care
relevant because the only populist legislative changes that occur are the ones that coincidentally match what the elite class was already interested in
The constitution doesn’t insist that patents exist, just that congress is the one who regulates them if they do
(Okay, not technically relevant, but it is an amazing coincidence. He does have a programming hobby, albeit not using the Haskell language.)
This last round of bricking was to bring about a faster CPU in the speakers, as if that matters. Didn't add features, just faster CPU.
Their support is pretty atrocious. They will always blame your router for not handling "point to point internal networking" correctly, as if that's a real possibility. They tell you you have to make one of their speakers your router and your current router needs to be put in AP mode.
Honestly they probably needed the faster CPU because they expect any of their speakers to be used a routers.
I am used to seeing statements that these legal cases cost $$$$ in legal fees, so I am curious what is likely to have been the spend on either side of the case. A $32.5 million verdict is likely significantly lower than Sonos had hoped. What was that likely to have been as a ratio of legal fees? Would Google have hired outside consul to help defend or is the in house staff sufficient to handle the case?
It's quite possible that both sides spent far more than $32.5 million on lawyers, but it made sense to fight.
Sonos, because they wanted to sue others and not just Google.
Google, because they didn't want to set a precedent that they'd give in when they hadn't actually infringed on anything.
It feels like they're stuck in the past (plus their devices still don't support RSTP).
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/znpnznkjgpl/...