On 9 October the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) sued Amazon Web Services (AWS) for patent infringement in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts (case 1:26-cv-14600), alleging that hardware-security technology used on AWS-related platforms infringes two US patents MIT holds — US 7,681,103 and US 7,818,569. The case is at the complaint stage and the court has made no finding of infringement (reported by Reuters on 12 October).
The two patents come from MIT's physical unclonable function (PUF) technology, invented by MIT professor Srinivas Devadas and his team and traceable to their foundational 2002 paper and the first PUF chip.
A PUF uses the tiny physical variations introduced when a chip is manufactured to generate a device-specific, hard-to-clone key, without storing the key in attack-prone non-volatile memory. The complaint says AWS-related platforms use SRAM PUF technology; MIT seeks damages, an accounting and interest, and demands a jury trial.
The case is also a window onto why universities sue technology giants. Top universities do more than publish papers: lab results are usually turned into IP assets along a chain of research, patent filing, a technology-transfer office and outward licensing. In the United States and similar jurisdictions, inventions made by faculty within the scope of their duties and with university resources generally belong to the university under its IP policy; here the assignee of both patents is MIT, not the individual inventor.
Publishing a paper and filing a patent are not in conflict, but the order matters: most jurisdictions require a patent application before public disclosure — publication, a talk or public use — or within a statutory grace period, or novelty may be lost. Even where a company can read the principle from a published paper, commercial use generally still needs a licence while the technology remains under a valid patent — which is exactly where the value of a university's patent portfolio, and the dispute in this case, lie.
J&C recommends that when working with universities or research institutes, or adopting technology from academic research, companies check whether the results are patent-pending or patented, who owns them and whether a licence is needed, and set out in the agreement the ownership of employment inventions and the order of disclosure versus filing; universities should file before any public disclosure and let the tech-transfer office coordinate ownership and licensing, so premature disclosure or unclear ownership does not erode patent value.
Source: storage.courtlistener.com
