By Blake Brittain
(Reuters) – Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:) Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud services provider, owes technology company Kove $525 million for infringing its patent rights on data storage technology, a new report said. a federal jury in Illinois said Wednesday.
The jury found that AWS infringed three of Kove’s patents covering technology that Kove said had become “essential” to Amazon’s cloud computing division’s ability to “store and retrieve massive amounts of data.”
Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the verdict. Kove’s lead attorney, Courtland Reichman, called the verdict “a testament to the power of innovation and the importance of protecting intellectual property rights for 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 suit that it pioneered technology that enables high-performance cloud storage “years before the advent of the cloud”.
Kove claimed that AWS’ Amazon S3 storage service, DynamoDB database service and other products infringed on cloud storage patents. The panel agreed with Kove on Wednesday that AWS infringed all three Kove patents at issue, although it rejected Kove’s argument that AWS willfully infringed his rights.
AWS had denied the allegations and argued that the patents were invalid.
Kove also sued Google (NASDAQ:) last year for infringing the same patents in a separate Illinois lawsuit that is still ongoing.