A US jury ruled that Amazon Web Services (AWS) willfully infringed two patents and must now pay $30.5 million for violating the patent owner's rights in computer networking and broadcasting technology.
The infringing technologies were AWS's Cloudfront content delivery network and the Virtual Private Cloud virtual network, which infringed patents originally owned by Boeing but obtained by Acceleration Bay.
The two patents in this case are said to involve methods for optimizing the delivery of data over a network. Without getting too technical, the technologies allow data to be sent peer-to-peer and flow over slow or broken connections forming a network.
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Acceleration Bay describes itself as an “incubator and investor” and recently won a separate patent lawsuit against Activision, in which the video game developer was ordered to pay $23.4 million.
The court's final ruling in the AWS case is coming soon, but the payout could still triple, due to the fact that Amazon “intentionally” violated the patents. AWS cloud services reportedly generate about $9 billion in operating profit per quarter, which represents about 62% of Amazon's total, so it probably won't be affected too much by the charges.
This is not the first time AWS has faced opposition with patented technology, as it had to pay $525 million in damages in early 2024 after losing a cloud storage patent case.
The tech giant has also had a long-running dispute with Nokia, with both companies filing patent lawsuits against each other in recent years; Most recently, in August 2024, AWS accused Nokia of more than a dozen violations of cloud computing technologies.
Since AWS is a dominant player in the cloud storage game, it naturally controls many of the technologies involved, which Nokia claimed was using without permission.
Through The Registry