Sonos filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against D+M Group over the Heos wireless multiroom-audio system launched earlier this year by Denon. In its suit in US District Court in Delaware, Sonos also complained that Denon “copied various aspects of Sonos’s marketing and branding,” but Sonos didn’t sue over those complaints. And in a blog post, Sonos co-founder and general counsel Craig Shelburne complained that “several companies have entered the wireless home audio space with product features, designs and messaging strikingly similar to Sonos, without truly moving the experience forward in any way.”
Denon’s newly-released Heos line of wireless speakers are remarkably similar to those from Sonos — so much so that Sonos is suing Denon for patent infringement. And Sonos is not the only one who thinks this way. We found the two products to be remarkably similar in a number of ways in a recent review comparing Sonos to Denon’s Heos line. We weren’t the only ones who thought so. Now Sonos is using these observations as part of its evidence that Denon has infringed on several of their patents. In a blog post yesterday, Craig Shelburne, the co-founder & general counsel of Sonos, outlines the company’s beef with Denon and its parent company D&M Holdings. Chief among the complaints is that the Heos product possesses “many of the same elements found in Sonos products, with little or no effort to differentiate features or functionality.” Shelburne further claims that Denon’s devices “infringe at least four Sonos patents.”
Now Sonos knows what it feels like to be Apple. By the way, Sonos and Apple produce the best products in their categories and have for decades.