Amazon has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in a patent lawsuit over data storage technologies. Jurors in Chicago concluded on Wednesday that the company violated three patents of the American company Kove in the service of its cloud division AWS. They awarded Kove $525 million (approximately €489 million). Amazon plans to appeal, a spokesperson says.
Because the patents have now expired, there will be no changes to the AWS services, the company emphasizes. Patent litigation in the US often involves initial awards of several hundred million dollars, which are often later reduced in appeals.
Tech heavyweights like Apple, Google and Amazon are repeatedly targeted by smaller companies looking to make money from their patents. Kove argued that the technologies the company invented “years before the advent of the cloud” are important for storing and retrieving large amounts of data on AWS.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
