A proposed order filed last Thursday in the Northern District of California San Jose Division moved to resolve a lengthy dispute between plaintiff Maplebear Inc. (doing business as Instacart) and defendants Cornershop Technlogoies, Inc., Cornershop Technologies LLC, Delivery Technologies US, Inc. (collectively, Cornershop). The agreement would reinforce a prior motion for entry of stipulated permanent injunction that the plaintiff and defendants had filed jointly.
Cornershop is Uber’s grocery shopping and delivery platform, a competitor to instacart. The initial suit against Cornershop, which Instacart filed in July 2020, accused the defendant of copyright infringement. Instacart alleged that Cornershop had been illegally using Instacart’s copyrighted images in an effort to promote their own grocery shopping and delivery platform.
The original suit claiming that Cornershop had “scraped Instacart’s Platform and misappropriated Instacart’s copyrighted product images and data,” asserted that the actions taken by Cornershop violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Copyright Act, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the Texas Harmful Access by a Computer Act, the Texas common law of unfair competition, and breached its contracts with Instacart.
In September 2021, the respective parties agreed to a stipulated order, specifically that Cornershop would no longer use the images of Instacart or engage in any other form of copyright infringement. Further, Cornershop would pay for a third party, The Berkeley Research Group, to image the copyrighted materials used by Cornershop and then remove and delete all the existing Instacart content and data in Cornershop’s database.
The injunction intended to settle the disagreement and the “remaining outstanding matters in dispute” would be completely resolved by Thursday’s proposed order. The proposed text dismisses the remainder of the action, explaining that each respective party would be responsible for their litigation fees.
Instacart was represented in the litigation by Keker & Van Nest, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, and Potter Minton. Cornershop was represented by Morrison & Forerster, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, and Gillam & Smith.
