It would be awesome if when reading a news article on court cases or patents, that your browser could automatically inform you about the actual patent or court case given the content of the article.<p>But implementing that would probably violate Microsoft patent on 'Extensibility for context-aware digital personal assistant' or one of the millions of other patents. It is better to not make that feature at all I guess.<p>I am not sure how anything gets made, unless you ignore patents, and then see if you get sued. No way the typical start-up is cognizant of the millions of patents they could potentially be violating. It would be impossible to even try to keep that in your head when being creative.
This article had a cursory description of the patent(s) that was (were) allegedly violated:<p><a href="https://www.engadget.com/sonos-google-itc-compliant-initial-ruling-220232437.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.engadget.com/sonos-google-itc-compliant-initial-...</a><p>Looks like the primary, initial complaint was around the tuning feature for the speakers. There is a link to subsequent complaints.<p>If you have a Sonos, when you first set up a speaker you use wave your mobile around while the speaker emits a tone and your phone mic sends it feedback on how to optimize the sound.
Hopefully, once they've sorted out their patent squabbles, Sonos and Google can enable better integration between their systems.<p>Right now, Sonos's Google Home/Assistant integration feels half-baked, and playing music is a much better experience on iOS due to the AirPlay 2 integration.
This is ridiculous. Pretty soon you don't be able to stream to a Raspberry Pi connected to a speaker without violating a patent. Their failure to even state what the patent is leads me to believe it is something basic like this which means I will never buy a Sonos product.