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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Epitale and Decoder is my show about big ideas and

other problems. This week I sat down with Patrick Spence, he's the CEO of Sonos. He was joined

by Eddie Lazarus, the Sonos chief legal officer. Now I wanted both Patrick and Eddie on the

show to talk about when a company like Sonos makes the decision to head to the courts and

increasingly Congress to protect its business. Sonos has long accused other tech giants of

stealing its tech, but in 2020 it actually sued Google for patent infringement. Sonos said

that it had disclosed details about how its technology worked during negotiations to

integrate Google's voice assistant and that Google had copied the tech and then released

cheaper products it's subsidized with revenue from search advertising.

Sonos recently won that patent lawsuit at the US International Trade Commission, which ruled

that Google infringed all five patents Sonos brought to court. In response, Google had

to change how some of its speakers worked, including reducing some functionality. Google

...