Amazon owes $525 million in cloud storage patent battle, US jury says By Reuters

blake briton

(Reuters) – Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:) Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud services provider, owes technology company Kove $525 million for allegedly infringing patents on data storage technology, an Illinois federal lawsuit says. The jury found out Wednesday.

The jury found that AWS had infringed three of Kove’s patents covering technologies that have become “essential” to the ability of Amazon’s cloud computing division to “store and retrieve large amounts of data.”

An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling. Kove’s lead attorney, Courtland Reichman, called the ruling “a testament to the power of innovation and the importance of protecting startups’ IP rights against big tech companies.”

Chicago-based Kove sued Amazon in 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The company pioneered technologies that enable high-performance cloud storage “years before the advent of the cloud,” the company said in its lawsuit.

Kove claimed that AWS’s Amazon S3 storage service, DynamoDB database service, and other products infringed its cloud storage patents. A jury on Wednesday agreed with Kove that AWS had infringed all three of Kove’s patents at issue, but rejected Kove’s claim that AWS knowingly infringed.

AWS denied the claim and claimed the patent was invalid.

Kove also sued Google (NASDAQ:) last year for infringing the same patents in a separate Illinois lawsuit that is still ongoing.