Acceleration Bay, Llc vs. Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Case Background

On July 6, 2022, Plaintiff Acceleration Bay, LLC filed a Patent Infringement lawsuit in the District Court of Delaware (Case number: 1:22cv904). The case was assigned to Judge Richard G. Andrews and referred to Judge Sherry R. Fallon.

Cause

Acceleration Bay LLC owned several patents (U.S. Patents 6,701,344; 6,714,966; 6,732,147; 6,829,634; 6,910,069; and '497) related to distributed network systems and methods. These patents covered technologies for implementing broadcast channels and information delivery services. They also included methods for joining and leaving broadcast channels using regular networks. The patents described specific network structures and processes for efficiently distributing data among participants in computer networks. Further, they aimed to overcome issues with scalability and reliability in conventional systems. Amazon offered various cloud computing and networking products and services that allegedly infringed on Acceleration Bay's patents. These included Amazon Web Services (AWS), Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), AWS App Mesh, Lambda, CloudFront, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Peering, Elastic Load Balancing, the Lumberyard game engine, GameLift, the Luna cloud gaming platform, Twitch streaming service, and Amazon Prime Video. Amazon utilized technologies like overlay networks, auto-scaling, content delivery networks, and peer-to-peer communication. These technologies fell within the scope of Acceleration Bay's patent claims. Acceleration Bay notified Amazon of the infringement on March 13, 2019, and offered to negotiate a license. However, Amazon did not respond and continued to infringe. The company made no efforts to avoid infringement despite being aware of the patents.

Injuries

Acceleration Bay suffered ongoing injury due to Amazon's continued unauthorized use of its patented technologies. This infringement deprived Acceleration Bay of its exclusive rights