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I have 10 nest mini speakers in my home, in various speaker groups. My main use cases are broken, because so many different apps play at wildly different volumes. I want to box them up, ship them to google, and get my money back. How do I do this?
For example, these changes mean you'll no longer be able to control the volume of a group of speakers. Instead, you'll have to change the volume on each individually. It also means you'll no longer be able to use the volume buttons on your phone to control a speaker group. Not here to defend Google, but how can something trivial like that even be patentable?
If "buy" buttons can be patented, pretty much anything can be.
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Does the moral situation change if I the seller make you agree not to tamper with the product before I sell it to you, and you do so?
Either I own it or I don't. If you don't want me to tamper with it, then you can't sell it to me. You can give me use of it under some other kind of agreement, but then you can't misrepresent that as a "sale".
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From my reading of the patent, it's not that the concept of speaker groupings was patented. Rather, a specific UI for showing and modifying the groupings and adjusting the volume. Unfortunately, there aren't many different ways to represent groupings in a UI.
That seems much more like an idea than an invention to me.
Here’s another example. Wouldn’t it be neat if the tree control in your file browser could have an icon that represents more than 1 file. That idea may or may not have much value. But you better not implement that idea because IBM has a patent on it.
Patents in software rarely meet the bar that most people have of inventions.
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If it covers even a dozen different trivial choices then the end result is extremely narrow.
My car looks like a sports car. Not just one corner rounded but look at all the aspects. Only I shall be able to make sports cars. I patented it. /s
You will then be surprised that car manufacturers often engage in court battles against Chinese knock-offs.
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My car looks like a sports car. Not just one corner rounded but look at all the aspects. Only I shall be able to make sports cars. I patented it. /s
Looks like a sports car isn’t a specific design. Compare a Bugatti Veyron with a 911 Turbo. They both have lot’s of rounded edges but somehow they are very easy to tell apart as are every brand of hyper car on the market. This wasn’t two companies that happened to come up with the same design, this was just blatant copying of pointless aesthetic details, which is illegal.
Which is very relevant in this case as in the court Samsung's lawyer couldn't tell iPad and Galaxy Tab apart from 10 feet away: https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/14/samsung_lawyer_co...
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I bet there’s even a patent for “adjust volumes dynamically per speaker based on real-time positional data to increase volume in a balanced way when possible”. If not, I claim this post demonstrates it’s an obvious thing to implement, so long as the user has their phone or another device equipped with mics on them.
Sonos does part of this: when you set up the speaker it sends out pings that are picked up by your phone which you have to wave around like you're doing a cleansing ceremony. To my knowledge it doesn't do this dynamically.
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Either I own it or I don't. If you don't want me to tamper with it, then you can't sell it to me. You can give me use of it under some other kind of agreement, but then you can't misrepresent that as a "sale".
Is your contention that a sale cannot contain a hybrid of services and goods, and must be one or the other?
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Either I own it or I don't. If you don't want me to tamper with it, then you can't sell it to me. You can give me use of it under some other kind of agreement, but then you can't misrepresent that as a "sale".
Is your contention that a sale cannot contain a hybrid of services and goods, and must be one or the other?
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Doesn't regular volume slider controls multiple remote speakers in case of connected Bluetooth headphones?
Depends on whether you consider a pair of bluetooth headphones as a single device or multiple devices. I'm unaware of many devices that output audio to multiple distinct bluetooth targets simultaneously. Bose have that feature as part of their app, but I don't think it's a standard thing as a rule.