Amazon.com Trial to See Webpage Copyright Grapple With 1976 Law

Amazon.com Inc. is heading to trial to defend against a furniture website provider’s copyright infringement accusations in a case that tests the application of a pre-internet law to modern technology.

In its lawsuit, FurnitureDealer.Net Inc. said it had a copyright over product descriptions it created for furniture wholesaler Coaster Company of America’s website. Amazon “scraped” hundreds of those descriptions from Coaster’s website and put them on its own online retail platform, infringing FurnitureDealer.Net’s copyright, according to the suit.

One of several questions that a Minnesota federal jury must decide is whether FurnitureDealer.Net’s copyright registration is invalid because the descriptions were ...