> his particular feature may have been your low-key expectation, but it’s unlikely it was your principal consideration.
That feature was advertised on the in-store endcap display where I bought the google speaker. It was the only reason I bought five of them.
The rest of the story is identical. Ship an infringing product, be forced to retract the feature to mitigate damages and so on.
> Would you be sympathetic to their cause?
I'm not sympathetic to Google or any other company that takes a feature away for customers to mitigate damages in a patent dispute. It really sucks to be a customer when it happens. But I do understand how it happens, and why, ultimately Google had no choice but to remove the feature. I'm also glad they did the right thing because in the case of Google, Sonos could have went after Google's customers, too... and I don't ever want a free patent lawsuit with my $29 speaker.
> his particular feature may have been your low-key expectation, but it’s unlikely it was your principal consideration.
This is like saying that an ad for a camera means you will be granted pretty models to take photos of.
Again, it is not a tech spec for a smart speaker, and never was. If you sincerely believe so, I am sympathetic; modern life is hard. If you don’t then try responding to my analogy instead.
> I'm not sympathetic to Google or any other company that takes a feature away
Again, in this case RED did not take any feature away after the fact—BM simply didn’t do their research ahead of time. They made a buck selling cameras by advertising a specific feature, then took it away when things got hot. Meanwhile, another camera manufacturer keeps selling cameras with this exact feature for years. There’s just nothing to be said and no passing the buck can make it look good.
There is literally no difference in removing whole home/multiroom audio from Google speakers and what happened with RED. Both Google and BM made the exact same mistake and fixed it the same way.
1) Google challenged Sonos, won, and apparently reinstated[0] the feature;
2) Google had to remove the patented feature. I don’t know how many times it should be reiterated in this thread that Blackmagic did not have to remove CinemaDNG support—again, it’s not a patented feature, there are cameras using it just fine. This move (removing support for the only open raw video standard) is anti-FOSS and designed in order to lock users into their proprietary ecosystem.
People keep drawing parallels with other patent lawsuits (and I for some reason keep wasting time looking into it—try doing own research, please), yet inevitably it only highlights how bad Blackmagic’s move was. There’s just nothing to be said and no passing the buck can make it look good for them.
So you can play it still, but only on one speaker. You can’t record CinemaDNG at all from BMPCCs. The feature was not limited in some ways; the feature is gone completely. It’s a completely different level of badness and no matter how Blackmagic spins it it’s a very bad look.
That feature was advertised on the in-store endcap display where I bought the google speaker. It was the only reason I bought five of them.
The rest of the story is identical. Ship an infringing product, be forced to retract the feature to mitigate damages and so on.
> Would you be sympathetic to their cause?
I'm not sympathetic to Google or any other company that takes a feature away for customers to mitigate damages in a patent dispute. It really sucks to be a customer when it happens. But I do understand how it happens, and why, ultimately Google had no choice but to remove the feature. I'm also glad they did the right thing because in the case of Google, Sonos could have went after Google's customers, too... and I don't ever want a free patent lawsuit with my $29 speaker.