Amazon Can’t Dodge Patent Suit Over Alleged Settlement Info Leak

Amazon.com Inc. failed to convince a federal judge in California to throw out a search engine-patent infringement suit filed by a plaintiff the retailer claimed had wrongly taken information from a prior settlement to create those patents.

MasterObjects Inc. filed the lawsuit over patents allegedly infringed by Amazon’s product search feature on its website. In June, Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California denied MasterObjects’s motion for disqualification of an Amazon in-house attorney, saying that despite raising what he called non-frivolous concerns, “the record is not strong enough to warrant disqualification.”

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