US Court fines Amazon's cloud service $525 million

A  jury in the United States has found the cloud platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) guilty of patent infringement against the Chicago-based company Kove. A fine of $525 million has been imposed for the unlawful use of another company's technologies on AWS, Datacenter Dynamics reports.

Kove's claims are related to the violation of rights to developments associated with data storage management systems and methods, as well as with search and information extraction. According to Kove's statements, AWS applies these technologies in its S3 and DynamoDB services without permission. In 2023, Kove filed a similar lawsuit against Google, which is currently under review.

Kove filed a lawsuit against AWS in December 2018. The case documents mention three American patents owned by Kove - No. 7,814,170, No. 7,103,640, and No. 7,233,978. The inventors are Dr. John Overton and Dr. Stephen Bailey, with Overton serving as Kove's CEO. In their complaint, the plaintiffs argue that Kove's technologies are crucial for AWS because the volume of data stored in the Amazon cloud is growing exponentially, and its cloud services have faced limitations in processing and extracting massive amounts of information.

In 2020, AWS countered with denials, denying the infringement of the patents in question and claiming that they were allegedly invalid and therefore not enforceable. However, AWS's arguments were not considered in court, and a fine was imposed on the cloud platform itself. Nevertheless, the jury rejected accusations that AWS deliberately infringed the patents. The cloud platform stated that it disagrees with the verdict and announced its intention to file an appeal.