A federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit claiming that the Walt Disney Co., DreamWorks Animation, Sony ImageWorks and other companies violated antitrust laws by conspiring to set animation wages via non-poaching agreements.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, in a ruling issued on Thursday, said that the plaintiffs “have sufficiently alleged facts showing that defendants reached an agreement to conspire.”

She wrote that the plaintiffs “have alleged that the defendants systematically shared information, agreed not to solicit each other’s employees and that the purpose of the information sharing and no-poach scheme was to suppress wages.”

The lawsuit was filed by former DreamWorks Animation senior character effects artist Robert Nitsch, former ImageMovers Digital production engineer David Wentworth and digital artist Georgia Cano, who held jobs at Rhythm & Hues, Walt Disney Feature Animation and ImageMovers Digital.

In April, she threw out their complaint, citing the statute of limitations. But in her most recent ruling, Koh said that the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged “affirmative acts” of concealment in their revised complaint, sufficient to toll the statute of limitations.

The workers contend that the roots of the anti-poaching agreements go back to the mid-1980s, when George Lucas and Ed Catmull, the president of Steve Jobs’ newly formed company Pixar, agreed to not raid each other’s employees.