AWS had to pay out millions in major patent dispute
A US jury has 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 broadcast technology.
The offending technologies were AWS’s Cloudfront content delivery network and the Virtual Private Cloud virtual network – which infringed on patents originally owned by Boeing but acquired by Acceleration Bay.
The two patents in this case are said to cover methods for streamlining data delivery over a network. Without getting too technical, the technologies allow data to be sent from peer to peer and flow over slow or disconnected links by forming a network.
Entity claim
Acceleration Bay describes itself as an “Incubator & 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 judgment in the AWS case will follow soon, but the payout could triple due to the fact that Amazon ‘willfully’ infringed the patents. AWS’s cloud services reportedly generate operating profits of about $9 billion per quarter – which amounts to about 62% of Amazon’s total, so it likely won’t be hit too hard by the charges.
This isn’t the first time AWS has faced opposition with proprietary technology, having previously been forced to pay $525 million in damages in 2024 after losing a cloud storage patent case.
The tech giant has also had a longstanding feud 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 infringements of cloud computing technologies.
Because AWS is a dominant player in cloud storage, it naturally controls many of the technologies involved, which it claims Nokia used without permission.
Via The registry