Blake Britten
(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, an Illinois federal jury found on 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 vast amounts of data.”
Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the verdict. Cove’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 start-up companies from the tech giants.”
Chicago-based Kove filed the lawsuit against Amazon in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in 2018. In the lawsuit, the company said it pioneered technology that enabled high-performance cloud storage “years before the cloud existed.”
Kove claimed that Amazon S3 storage service, DynamoDB database service and other AWS products violate cloud storage patents. On Wednesday, the jury agreed with Kove that AWS infringed all three of Kove’s patents at issue, but rejected Kove’s claim that AWS willfully infringed his rights.
AWS denied the allegations and said the patents were invalid.
Last year, Cove also sued Google (NASDAQ:) for infringing the same patents in a separate lawsuit in Illinois that is still ongoing.