- Bezos Company Reprimanded for Violating Three Kove Cloud Storage Patents
- Chicago-based Kove sued Amazon for violations in 2018
Amazon has been ordered to pay $525 million to a small Chicago-based technology company in damages for patent infringement in a David-versus-Goliath legal fight over cloud storage.
Kove, which has about 20 employees compared to Amazon Web Service’s 136,000, claimed in a 2018 court filing that the tech giant used three of its patents as “building blocks” for its hugely profitable cloud storage service.
Yesterday, a jury agreed and awarded the small business more than half a billion dollars in damages.
Amazon has since promised to appeal the decision.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest man, with his fiancée Lauren Sanchez at the White House on April 10.
Kove, the Chicago-based company, operates out of an office in this Chicago warehouse
The jury determined that AWS infringed three Kove patents covering technology that Kove said had become “essential” to the ability of Amazon’s cloud computing arm to “store and retrieve enormous amounts of data.”
Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the verdict.
John Overton, CEO of Kove
Kove’s lead attorney, Courtland Reichman, called the verdict “a testament to the power of innovation and the importance of protecting the intellectual property rights of startups against tech giants.”
Chicago-based Kove sued Amazon in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in 2018.
The company said in the lawsuit that it pioneered technology enabling high-performance cloud storage “years before the advent of the cloud.”
Kove alleged that AWS’s Amazon S3 storage service, DynamoDB database service and other products infringe cloud storage patents.
On Wednesday, the jury agreed with Kove that AWS had infringed all three of Kove’s patents at issue, although it rejected Kove’s claim that AWS had willfully infringed its rights.
AWS had denied these allegations and maintained that the patents were invalid.
Amazon Web Services is one of the company’s largest revenue streams, bringing in $88 billion in 2023.
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