Apple asks a court to protect its streaming service from a Boomcloud 360 patent fight

Apple went to federal court on August 5, filing suit in the Southern District of California and asking a judge to rule that none of its hardware, from iPhones and iPads to AirPods and Beats headphones, infringes on three spatial audio patents held by Boomcloud 360. The company demanded a jury trial. The three patents, covering techniques for enhancing stereo audio and canceling crosstalk between speakers, were issued between 2019 and 2020 and credit inventor Zachary Seldess, based in San Diego.

Apple was not named as a defendant in any of Boomcloud's prior suits, but the company has repeatedly pointed to Apple devices as infringing while suing other companies that sell or use them. Boomcloud sued AT&T and T-Mobile in January over the same three patents, then filed further suits against Walmart, Target and Best Buy in June, all in the Eastern District of Texas. Apple's complaint argues that an "actual and justiciable controversy" exists between the two companies even though Apple itself has not been sued directly, and it asks the court to find the case exceptional enough to award Apple its legal costs.

Apple's filing also takes aim at how Boomcloud markets its technology: it reproduced an image from Boomcloud's own website carrying a CNN quote reading "with Beats headphones, the sound was off-the-charts awesome," and cited Boomcloud's own claim, made in its case against AT&T, that its audio technology has "been licensed and implemented by several large companies, including Qualcomm."

The dispute centers on Apple Music's Spatial Audio feature, which the company rolled out with Dolby Atmos support in 2021, offering it free to subscribers and playing it by default on AirPods and Beats headphones. Apple has said it pays higher royalties for tracks available in the format and that more than 90 percent of its listeners had experienced spatial audio by early 2024. Apple Music raised its subscription prices worldwide on July 17, its first increase since 2022, a detail that surfaced in Apple's own filing as context for how central the feature has become to its music service.

Boomcloud 360, based in Encinitas, California, develops audio enhancement technology for phones, headphones and speakers, and this dispute over how its patents apply to a major streaming service sits outside the genre lanes MusicSuey otherwise tracks, which is why it runs without a genre tag here.