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

Amazon is suing Nokia, accusing the networking giant of having violated a dozen of Amazon’s cloud patents. The court fight is likely to explore the technical underpinnings of various Nokia products in an attempt to determine whether Nokia stole the ideas from Amazon or whether Nokia engineers came up with them on their own.

The specific Nokia products targeted in the lawsuit filed Tuesday are Nokia Airframe Data Center, Nokia CloudBand, Nokia CloudBand Application Manager, Nokia CloudBand Infrastructure Software, Nokia Container Services, Nokia Cloud Operations Manager, Nokia Nuage Networks Virtualized Cloud Services, Nokia Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform and Nokia Nuage Software Defined Network (SDN).

Injunction

The filing asks for an injunction against further direct or future indirect infringement of the asserted patents.

Amazon’s lawsuit also said that Nokia customers may get pulled into this litigation: Nokia is causing “patent infringement by its customers” and Nokia is “willfully blind to the possibility that its inducing acts will cause infringement” for its customers, it said. 

As an example, Amazon’s filing said, “Nokia will sell Nokia AirFrame Data Center and Nokia CloudBand Infrastructure Software with the knowledge and intent that customers who buy it will use it for their infringing use and therefore that customers will be directly infringing the ’211 patent,” referring in this case to a 2016 patent titled “Managing communications between computing nodes.”

It is quite possible that Nokia may have forced Amazon’s hand to file this lawsuit given that Nokia sued Amazon for patent violations in October 2023. Back then, Nokia Chief Licensing Officer Arvin Patel wrote in a blog post: “Today, we have commenced legal action against Amazon for the unauthorized use of Nokia’s video-related technologies in its streaming services and devices. Cases have been filed in the US, Germany, India, the UK, and the European Unified Patent Court. Amazon Prime Video and Amazon’s streaming devices infringe a mix of Nokia’s multimedia patents covering multiple technologies including video compression, content delivery, content recommendation and aspects related to hardware. Separately, we have also filed cases in the US against HP for the unauthorized use of Nokia’s patented video-related technologies in their devices.”

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.”

Another patent claim specifically addresses one Nokia product. “The ’080 patent further recites ‘providing a virtual peering router configured to manage an interconnection between the first virtual computer network and the second virtual computer network.’ The Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform practices this limitation. For example, the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform includes a ‘Nuage Networks NSG-BR (border router) [that] extends seamless connectivity between disparate networks. It connects untrusted domains (partner Extranet networks) to the core enterprise trusted network and provides the gateway functionality for partner Extranet connectivity.’”

In addition to its demand for an injunction against further infringement of the patents, Amazon asked the court for “an award of damages adequate to compensate Amazon for the patent infringement that has occurred, together with pre-judgment interest and costs.”