Amazon to pay $525 million for violating tech firm's patent rights

CHICAGO, Illinois: An Illinois federal jury says Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services (ASW), the world's largest cloud-service provider, violated the patent rights for data-storage technology of tech company Kove and must pay US$525 million.

The jury said AWS infringed three Kove patents covering technology that became "essential" to Amazon's cloud-computing arm's ability to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data."

A company spokesperson said that Amazon disagrees with the verdict and intends to appeal.

The verdict is "a testament to the power of innovation and the importance of protecting IP (intellectual property) rights for start-up companies against tech giants," said Courtland Reichman, lead attorney of Chicago-based Kove.

Kove sued Amazon in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in 2018.

In the lawsuit, Kove said it pioneered technology enabling high-performance cloud storage "years before the advent of the cloud."

The jury agreed with Kove's claim that AWS' Amazon S3 storage service, DynamoDB database service, and other products infringed the cloud-storage patents.

It also agreed that AWS infringed all three Kove patents at issue, but it rejected Kove's contention that AWS violated its rights willfully.

AWS had denied the allegations and argued that the patents were invalid.

In 2023, Kove sued Google in a separate Illinois lawsuit for infringing the same patents. This legal action is still ongoing.