On June 13th, CB Insights, a world-renowned market research institute, released the "China’s Edge Computing Driving Forces 2020" report, which analyzed China's cloud edge collaborative development process and selected 27 companies that promote the development of China's edge computing. As leaders in the CDN industry, Wangsu Science & Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Wangsu") and Guizhou BaishanCloud Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "BaishanCloud") are among the five edge cloud companies selected in the report. Meanwhile, the patent battle between these two technology companies has always attracted attention.

On May 30, 2019, Wangsu sued BaishanCloud for patent infringement (patents involved were ZL201310147926.9 and ZL201310349444.1), and requested the court to order BaishanCloud to stop using the above-mentioned patents in cloud distribution products and services, and to compensate economic losses totaling RMB 150 million and reasonable rights protection costs of RMB 1.23 million spent to stop the infringement.

As a counterattack, BaishanCloud, on the one hand, filed a request for invalidation of the above-mentioned patents with the Reexamination and Invalidation Department of the Patent Office, CNIPA on July 2, 2019 and August 5, 2019. On the other hand, on August 15, 2019, BaishanCloud sued Wangsu and its Beijing branch for infringing BaishanCloud’s patent rights of ZL 201710517875.2 and ZL 201710018349.1, and requested the court to order Wangsu to compensate economic losses totaling RMB 160 million and to bear the relevant rights protection costs.

Facing the counterattack of BaishanCloud, Wangsu did not compromise, but filed a patent lawsuit again, and requested the court to order BaishanCloud to compensate economic losses totaling RMB 100 million and to bear reasonable rights protection costs of 1 million, on the ground that BaishanCloud allegedly infringed its patent rights (the patents involved were ZL201511015920.1 and ZL201710650961.0). At the same time, it filed a request for invalidation of the two patents of BaishanCloud.

The cumulative amount of patent infringement cases between Wangsu and BaishanCloud has reached 410 million yuan, which is not a small amount for both parties. The essence of the patent battle is the fierce market competition in the CDN industry. CDN, content distribution network, is used to reduce network congestion and increase the corresponding speed and hit rate of user access. It is vividly referred to as a "network accelerator" and is an essential infrastructure for 5G era. Wangsu and BaishanCloud are innovative companies in the CDN industry. The final result of the patent battle between them may have a certain impact on the CDN industry.