SIIA Statement in the matter of patents and Sonos. 

SIIA’s members have benefited greatly from the patents they own. Yet they also rely on the limits of patent protection, as those limits preserve and protect their ability to innovate. As such, SIIA’s collective membership sits at the crossroads of the countervailing interests in many of the ongoing intellectual property debates in recent years. Our members are keenly focused on the health of the patent system, especially as applied to software. 

SIIA has filed a case because Sonos has directly challenged this bedrock principle: it has asked the Commission to exclude non-infringing articles. Although it infringed Sonos’s patents, Google also timely provided redesigns for inspection: specifically, source code and physical product that the ALJ found did not infringe. (See ID at 25, 34, 40). In its petition, Sonos complains that despite the infringement of its initial designs, “Google hit pay dirt on four [redesigns], which it can now spend additional time completing, and then upload on its devices to continue competing with Sonos without missing a beat.”

Full statement, here.