One Pissed off Judge

Let me tell you about a garbage cloud connected audio product company, one that abuses its customers and bricks its products to fuel sales.

You know, I don't wanna name this garbage supplier of cloud connected sound systems, so let's just make a name up.  We'll call it, "Sonos."

It turns out that they are suing a garbage search engine company that also makes hardware, and is notorious for canceling products and leave its customers in a lurch.

You know, I don't wanna name this garbage search engine provider, so let's just make a name up.  We'll call it, "Google."

Well, "Sonos" sued "Google" claiming patent infringement, but there is a twist.

You see the garbage sound system company filed a garbage patent application in 2006, and when the garbage search engine provider started delivering cloud connected sound systems in 2015, Sonos filed a patent for the technology.

You got that right, they filed for the patent after Google announced the product.

They filed in 2018, 3 years after Google announced, but, and here's the twist, they cited the 2006 patent that had lain dormant for years in the 2018 patent, and thus claimed that Google had violated the patent because of this legal TARDIS.  (I know, TARDIS is not a generally accepted legal term, but it should be.)

This went to a jury, who awarded $32½ million, but the judge, the remarkably tech savvy William Allsup, overruled the jury and invalidated the patent while unleashing a can of rhetorical whup ass rarely seen outside of a ruling where Donald Trump is the defendant.

When a judge says, "It is wrong that our system was used to punish an innovator and to enrich a pretender," that's a pretty good indication that they are sick of this patent troll bull sh%$.

Basically he said that the patent was invalidated by laches, which is legalese for, "You snooze, you lose," and the application of this concept is pretty rare, particularly as it applies to patents:

A California judge has quashed one of Sonos's legal victories against Google – and the $32.5 million royalty payout that came along with it – declaring Sonos's patents at the heart of the matter were the unenforceable work of a "pretender" attempting to "punish an innovator … by delay and sleight of hand."

Judge William Alsup's order [PDF] invalidating the two patents at issue vacates a jury verdict from May of this year. The jury had found Google had infringed one of the patents, which concerned managing groups of smart speakers in a multi-room space.

Essentially, in this particular case, Sonos said the ability to group together Google Nest and Home smart speakers in your house or apartment – specifically, allowing gear to belong to more than one speaker group – infringed its intellectual property, and it demanded royalties. Sonos is also known for its multi-room speaker kit.

Unfortunately for Sonos, Alsup, a federal district judge in San Francisco, concluded after some investigation by himself that the two patents – 10,848,885 and 10,469,966 – in question were unenforceable based on a doctrine known as "prosecution laches." The rarely used laches defense is applicable when there is an unreasonable and unexplained delay in patent prosecution despite opportunities to do so earlier.

The patents in suit stem from an application made way back in 2006, Alsup explained, "but [Sonos] did not file the applications for these patents and present the asserted claims for examination until 2019." Sonos linking its 2019 patents (used to challenge Google in court) to that earlier 2006 application was spurious, the judge concluded, and was done only to claim a prior date before Google's allegedly infringing products came to market in 2015.

In essence, Alsup decided, Sonos was trying to punish Google retroactively by reaching into the past and connecting patent filings made over a decade apart.

………

Alsup is likely to agree with the need for some guardrails, as he concluded that Sonos's laches were an abuse of the patent system.

"It is wrong that our patent system was used in this way," Alsup wrote in his conclusion. "With its constitutional underpinnings, this system is intended to promote and protect innovation. Here, by contrast, it was used to punish an innovator and to enrich a pretender by delay and sleight of hand."

What is interesting is how much more skeptical judges, but including the Supreme Court, about the use of patents to extract rent for things that should not be subject to government enforced exclusivity.

In a perfect world, Congress would do something about this, but given that the House of Representatives is being run by 8-Year-Olds, and the Senate is being held hostage by Sinema and Manchin, I am not optimistic about this.