Google has been let off paying wireless audio firm Sonos (NASDAQ:SONO) US$32.5 million after a California federal judge found the latter’s patents to be “unenforceable”.
Judge William Alsup ruled on Friday that Sonos (NASDAQ:SONO) had incorrectly linked patents for its multi-room technology to a 2006 application for the rights.
“This was not a case of an inventor leading the industry to something new,” he said.
“This was a case of the industry-leading with something new and, only then, an inventor coming out of the woodwork to say that he had come up with the idea first.”
Sonos (NASDAQ:SONO) had won its case against Google in San Francisco in May, when the federal court ruled that it could collect US$32.5 million in damages from the Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) subsidiary.
However, Aslup then overturned the ruling on Friday after arguments from Google that Sonos took over a decade to apply to patent its multi-room tech since the original provisional application in 2006.
“The essence of this order is that the patents [were] issued after an unreasonable, inexcusable, and prejudicial delay of over thirteen years,” Alsup added.
“Sonos filed the provisional application from which the patents in suit claim priority in 2006, but it did not file the applications for these patents and present the asserted claims for examination until 2019.
“By [then] the industry had already marched on and put the claimed invention into practice.”