Because the company apparently violated patent rights, Amazon owes a US company more than half a billion dollars. Specifically, it’s about data storage technology at the world’s largest cloud provider AWS.
Amazon has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in a patent lawsuit involving data storage technologies. Jurors in Chicago concluded that the Amazon Web Services division, the world’s largest provider of cloud services, violated three patents owned by the US company Kove.
Amazon is appealing
According to the federal court in Illinois, the patents cover technology that Kove said has become “indispensable” to Amazon’s cloud computing division. The Chicago-based company argued that the technology, invented “years before the advent of the cloud,” was important for storing and retrieving large amounts of data on AWS.
Kove’s lead attorney, Courtland Reichman, called the ruling “a testament to the power of innovation and the importance of protecting intellectual property for start-up companies versus tech giants.” The company sued Amazon in 2018. The company had pioneered technology for high-performance cloud storage, it was said at the time.
Amazon therefore owes the technology company $525 million, the jury said. However, the online retailer wants to appeal, as a spokesman reported. Since the patents have now expired, there will be no changes to AWS services, the company emphasized.
Kove also sued Google
In patent litigation in the USA, in many cases, amounts of several hundred million dollars are initially awarded, which are often later reduced in appeal proceedings. Tech heavyweights like Apple, Google and Amazon are repeatedly targeted by smaller companies that want to monetize their patents.
The jury in the Amazon case rejected the claim that AWS intentionally violated its rights. Kove also sued Google last year for violating the same patents. The separate case in Illinois is ongoing.