On April 11, 2024, a federal jury in Illinois, the United States, said that AWS must pay $525 million (about 3.8 billion yuan) for infringing Kove's patent rights in data storage technology.
The jury found that AWS infringed three of Kove's patents, which Kove claimed were "critical" to AWS's ability to "store and retrieve large amounts of data."
Courtland Reichman, Kove's lead lawyer, called the ruling "a testament to the power of innovation and the importance of protecting startups' intellectual property from being infringed by tech giants." ”
Chicago-based Kove sued Amazon in 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Kove said in the lawsuit that it pioneered the technology that enabled high-performance cloud storage "years before cloud computing came along." The three patents address breakthrough technology that can efficiently identify multiple servers that store a particular data file in the cloud.
According to Kove, the AWS cloud data storage offering is built on Kove's patent-pending technology for scalable cloud systems.
"It is by infringing Kove's patents that AWS has been able to offer such a wide range of cloud services at such a scale, paving the way for AWS to become Amazon's largest profit center," the complaint states. ”
Kove alleges that AWS's Amazon S3 storage service, DynamoDB database service, and other products infringe its cloud storage patents.
On Wednesday, a jury upheld Kove's argument and found that AWS infringed all three of Kove's patents, though refuted Kove's claim that AWS willfully infringed its rights.
AWS denied the allegations and argued that the patents were invalid.
Kove also sued Google last year for infringing the same patent in another lawsuit in Illinois that is still pending.