GOOGLE is reinstating a popular feature to a number of its gadgets after winning a legal battle against Sonos.
The tech giant removed a speaker grouping tool as Sonos claimed the idea belongs to them.
Nest devices can now be part of multiple speaker groups again
It meant that owners of Nest speakers and displays, as well as Chromecast, could no longer be kept in multiple speaker groups.
Instead, they could only be added to one speaker group at a time.
A US judge threw out the Sonos $32.5million jury verdict win against Google for two of its key patents.
“This was not a case of an inventor leading the industry to something new,” US District Judge William Alsup 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 — wringing fresh claims to read on a competitor’s products from an ancient application.”
Google is reversing the changes despite Sonos saying it intends to appeal the ruling.
A Sonos spokesperson said the ruling was “wrong on both the facts and law”.
Google has started to roll things back and said it will be available across devices and Android in the next 48 hours.
It’ll be reversed on the Home app for iOS “soon” too.
“In light of this legal decision we’re happy to share that we will be rolling back this change,” Google explained.
“Devices will be able to belong to multiple speaker groups and you will no longer run into an error when trying to add a device to additional groups.”
The company’s general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said: “Sonos has been running a years-long, misleading campaign against helpful features in our Google Home devices and smart speaker devices on spurious patent grounds.
“This decision is good news for our users who will once again be able to seamlessly group and integrate Google smart speakers, and for continued innovation of new features across the industry.”
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