Amazon hits Nokia with a patent lawsuit, implicating many of Nokia’s cloud offerings

Inception

In its legal filing, Amazon painted itself as having all but created cloud computing. “Since its inception in 2006, AWS has fundamentally transformed large-scale computing and internet communications. Before AWS launched its pioneering technology, largescale computing relied predominantly on on-premise physical servers and software installations. This model required high up-front costs, required continuous maintenance, and lacked scalability. AWS’s technology changed this by democratizing access to computing infrastructure and software through its cloud-based, on-demand services model.”

It then contrasted Amazon and Nokia.

“Amazon’s two decades of groundbreaking technological development in cloud computing stand in stark contrast to Nokia’s recent efforts. With the advent of smartphones developed by Apple and Samsung, among others, Nokia’s prominence in the mobile phone market has plummeted. Nokia’s failure to anticipate the importance of smartphone technology led it to the verge of bankruptcy in 2013,” the lawsuit said.

Amazon’s description of Nokia’s recovery glossed over the fact that, since the very beginning of its interest in mobile communications technology, the company had developed and sold both network infrastructure and terminal devices: “To save the company, Nokia exited the mobile device business in 2014 — an act its board chairman referred to as a ‘moment of reinvention’ — and pivoted to the sale of 5G network infrastructure and associated services that it acquired from Alcatel-Lucent in 2016. […] Nokia’s ‘new company strategy’ involved leveraging Amazon’s innovative solutions, including Amazon’s patented technology, to address issues faced by cloud service providers,” Amazon said in its filing.

Infringement?

It then listed its dozen relevant patents and made arguments why all of those Nokia products violated those patents in various ways. 

The patents cited cover a wide range of core cloud elements. One of the patents, for example, “claimed techniques for providing logical networking functionality for computer networks are a concrete technical contribution and not simply the embodiment of an abstract idea. The ’540 patent involves a specific system for implementing a virtual computer network without physically implementing the network topology that has concrete and valuable technical advantages in the field of virtual computer networks.”