Sonos wins $32.5 million patent infringement win over Google

Google has been ordered to pay $32.5 million to Sonos for infringing on the company’s smart speaker patent. A jury verdict A case released in a San Francisco courtroom on Friday found that Google’s smart speakers and media players infringed on one of Sonos’ two patents.

“This is a narrow dispute about some very specific features that are not commonly used,” Google spokesman Peter Schottenfels said in a statement. ledge, “Of the six patents Sonos originally claimed, only one was infringed, and the rest were dismissed as invalid or not infringed. We have always developed the technology independently and We have competed on the basis of ideas. We are considering our next steps.”

Sonos didn’t emerge outright victorious from the case, however, as the jury decided that Google’s Home app didn’t infringe a separate patent filed by Sonos. The judge asked jurors to “disregard the $90 million damage estimate from the Sonos expert witness, saying she had decided that some of the evidence provided was inadmissible,” law360 reports,

The decision will go down as an embarrassing defeat for Google, but both companies were the subject of blunt criticism from Judge William Alsup, who has presided over several tech company court battles. Alsup expressed dismay that the case had ever gone to trial for the first time and that the two sides were unable to reach a settlement. He called it “the epitome of patent litigation at its worst.” He also noted the technical jargon surrounding the patents at issue, at one point checking with jurors to make sure they hadn’t fallen asleep, according to law360,

Update May 26th, 5:30PM ET: Updated to add a statement from a Google spokesperson.