The US International Trade Commission announced on Friday that it would look into claims made against Sonos by Alphabet Inc.'s Google that the home-audio business had violated Google patents by importing particular audio components.
The agency declined to specify which particular goods were purportedly imported in possible violation of American trade law. It claimed that no decision had been reached on the case's merits as of yet.
Additional lawsuits in California, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and other jurisdictions have been filed in the ongoing patent dispute between the former partners regarding audio and smart speaker technologies.
The trade commission issued a restriction on select Google devices' imports after Sonos prevailed. In the past month, Google filed lawsuits in federal court in California alleging that Sonos' new voice-assistant technology breaches their terms of service (https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-sues-sonos-over-new-voice-assistant-technology-2022-08-08).several Google patents. Sonos has called those lawsuits an "intimidation tactic."
The trade commission announced that it will schedule an evidentiary hearing and set a deadline of 45 days for concluding its investigation into Google's most recent complaints.
