LED lighting is similarly wedged in patent hell. Put the damn things on "flexible wire" and the lawyers will devour you. If you want to launch a product in the space, expect that you will need to hire a bevy of attorneys to get things in order and expect your IP license costs to exceed your BOM costs by about a factor of 5.

I believe strings of "dumb" LEDs are mostly free of IP, but once you start getting into controlling them in some way by sending signals over that wire, you are squarely in the soup.

The article just says that the patent could be a reason that the white-noise system didn't take off, but also notes it could be due to regulations. If you make your bulldozer with the beep-beep alert it meets regulations everywhere. If you make it with anything different that might not be the case.