Wal-Mart and Amazon.com have settled their suits, deflating what had the potential to become a contentious intellectual property issue.
The Arkansas chain initiated the wrangling when it accused Amazon. com and partner Drugstore.com of appropriating trade secrets through the hiring of several former Wal-Mart information technology employees. The e-retailer fired back by countersuing Wal-Mart and denying that it had procured illegal data from these workers (News, March 15).
Under the settlement, Amazon will reassign an unspecified number of information technology employees to roles other than the ones they held at Wal-Mart. Richard Dalzell, Amazon's chief information officer, who was named in the suit, will remain in his current position. Neither party will pay damages.
Amazon public relations director Bill Curry told PW that the jobs would be tweaked so that Wal-Mart won't feel as if proprietary information is being shared. Otherwise, he emphasized the relief felt at the suit's resolution. "The important thing about this agreement is that nothing in it constrains our ability to hire Wal-Mart employees, just in how we use them," he said, adding, "Our general philosophy is to hire the most talented people, regardless of where they work."
"What made this interesting is that the property was intangible and was fully in the heads of the employees," said Ed Gray, an intellectual property lawyer with the firm of Fitch, Even, Tabin &Flannery, adding that had the suit gone to trial, "the result would probably have been the same as what happened as a result of the settlement."
