At some point it becomes worth it to put in the effort to try to get the Sonos patents invalidated, and some of them seem very broad. Hard to believe that some of those things were “invented” only in the last 20 years. Most inventions aren’t patented, so I’d speculate that probably almost all patents could be invalidated by someone dedicated with a team of experts to scour history for prior art.
There was nothing comparable to a modern multiroom smart speaker around in 2001, so they certainly were invented in the last 20 years. Whether that was by Sonos or by someone else, and whether these specific patents should have been granted is another question of course.
I remember musik in the 1990s at the restaurant I worked at. We had it in the kitchen and a different channel in the seating area. Turn a switch on the wall to change channels, if the kitchen and seating were on the same channel then they had music in sync.
Now this was an entirely hardwired system, and there was no remote. I don't know what sonos's patents are for, but the idea was in place and the difference is do it by wireless computer.
This particular patent specifically covers a mesh network of independent playback devices that can be dynamically rearranged into possibly overlapping zones, with the volume controls being on a separate device in the local network. That's pretty far removed from a simple hard-wired two-channel audio system.
I'm opposed to software patents in general so I also think this should not be patentable, but it's hard to deny that there's a ton of engineering effort required to implement such a system and its not just a matter of adding a few lines of code to an existing audio application.
