Judge Won’t Ax Copyright Claims in Amazon, Furniture Site Spat

Amazon.com, Inc. and a furniture company are on the hook for allegedly lifting copyrighted content from a furniture marketing company for their own sales.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota March 14 denied COA, INC.'s attempt to dismiss FurnitureDealer.Net’s claims that it and Amazon had allegedly infringed copyrighted “search engine optimized descriptive text” when posting ads for COA’s Coaster furniture on Amazon.com. FDN said it wrote the text to describe Coaster furniture to be sold on Coaster’s website.

The case is significant in that descriptive text isn’t typically brought up in copyright cases. Coaster had argued in ...