AWS Became Amazon’s ‘Largest Profit Center’ on Theft of 3 Patents, Says Complaint

Amazon Web Services stole three Kove inventions to become the world’s first large-scale vendor of “economical cloud infrastructure and services,” alleged a Wednesday complaint (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in Chicago. AWS' access to the cloud “without having to set up their own servers, software, and functionality” on the wide "scope and scale was made possible through infringement of Kove’s patents,” said Kove. The patent theft paved the way for AWS “to become what is believed to be Amazon’s largest profit center,” it said. Kove is a “small, innovative product company competing in a field of behemoths,” including AWS, it said. Respect for Kove’s IP, “as the law requires, is essential to fair competition,” it said. Kove’s inventors developed the “breakthrough technology” for enabling “high-performance, hyper-scalable” cloud storage years before the commercial “advent” of the cloud, it said. Kove’s technology “became essential to AWS as the volume of data stored on its cloud grew exponentially and its cloud storage business faced limitations on the ability to store and retrieve massive amounts of data,” it said. "We don’t comment on active litigation," emailed Amazon spokesperson Angie Quennell Thursday.