Storage technologies

Patent dispute: Amazon to pay $525 million fine

Amazon has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in a patent lawsuit concerning data storage technologies. Jurors in Chicago came to the conclusion on Wednesday that the company infringed three patents held by US company Kove in the services of its cloud division AWS. They awarded Kove 525 million dollars (around 489 million euros). Amazon intends to appeal, said a spokesperson.

As the patents have now expired, there will be no changes to AWS services, the company emphasized. In patent lawsuits in the USA, amounts of several hundred million dollars are often initially awarded, which are often later reduced in appeal proceedings.

Tech heavyweights such as Apple, Google and Amazon are repeatedly targeted by smaller companies that want to monetize their patents. Kove argued that the technologies invented by the company "years before the advent of the cloud" were important for storing and retrieving large amounts of data at AWS.