Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/the-law-page/bc-court-seeking-global-reach-orders-google-to-block-sites/article19212708/

by tempestn • 12 years ago

155 103 12 years ago

theglobeandmail.com

bambax• 12 years ago

This is insane.

The plaintiff, Equustek Solutions Inc., says the main defendant, Morgan Jack, sells networking devices that infringe on their trademark.

The defendant sells these things online; the plaintiff wants his websites to be dereferenced from Google.

The court agreed and asked Google to remove the links on all its properties worldwide (not just google.ca).

But what does Google have to do with this?

Why does the plaintiff not go after the infringer, to shut his websites down and/or fine him and/or get him in prison?

Telling Google to remove the links (worldwide!!) is like issuing an injunction against all restaurants the world over to stop selling food to anyone called "Morgan Jack" in the remote chance it will have an effect on his business.

johnchristopher• 12 years ago

Well, it's often said around here that we should consider Google to be in the ad business, right ? Then following that logic Google is actually advertising illegal stuff by providing links to Morgan Jack's website on Google's own site.

I am not convinced by that line of thoughts, though.

Telling Google to remove the links (worldwide!!) is like issuing an injunction against all restaurants the world over to stop selling food to anyone called "Morgan Jack" in the remote chance it will have an effect on his business.

But Google would be the only restaurant on the whole planet in that analogy.

DanBC3• 12 years ago

To further the analogy - it would be like telling McDonalds to not sell food to this person but ignoring In'n'Out Burger and Burger King.

I understand the point about forcing Google to stop sellin advertising to this person. I am confused about how a disappeared person continues to pay for services from Google; why didn't anyone get a court order to force Google to release information about the infringer?

{edit: i did not downvote parent. I am not sure why parent has been downvoted}

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

Well Google is the only one that matters. Sure Bing and DDG exist and you can sometimes bump into a person using either of those, but for majority of the population, Google is the Internet, for better or worse.

mseebach• 12 years ago

Well, it's often said around here that we should consider Google to be in the ad business, right ? Then following that logic Google is actually advertising illegal stuff by providing links to Morgan Jack's website on Google's own site.

Google is in the ad business in the same way a newspaper or a magazine is: Selling ads is the major source of income. Every time someone says that Google is an ad business, for calibration remind yourself that so is the New York Times.

Anyway, Google linking (in the regular results section, not ads) to the website of a given business is similar to a newspaper or magazine stating in editorial content that a certain business exists and what its address is. That is obviously not "selling ads" in any way, shape or form.

Natsu• 12 years ago

Some part of me wonders what would happen if they were to turn off Google to Canada for a day and list the judge's phone number as the person to complain to.

(Probably one very angry judge, but I wonder...)

tempestn8• 12 years ago

Probably a lot of angry users, anti-trust proceedings, and a bunch of other stuff they don't want.

kryptiskt• 12 years ago

Sounds like something from here would apply:

"Contempt of Court includes the following behaviours:

- Fails to maintain a respectful attitude, remain silent or refrain from showing approval or disapproval of the proceeding

- Refuses or neglects to obey a subpoena

- Willfully disobeys a process or order of the Court

- Interfere with the orderly administration of justice or to impair the authority or dignity of the Court"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_court#Canada

jacquesm6• 12 years ago

I've been party to a court session where the defendant tried to pull something like that. Let's just say I would advise against it, 'career limiting move' does not even begin to describe it.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

They should delist the other guy as well so it does appear they are taking sides. Delisting the Canadian government might be worthwhile too

wbillingsley2• 12 years ago

I think one inevitable fairly result would be many other national governments observing Google trying to use its market position in order to bully the courts and overpower the rule of law in a country, and swiftly passing legislation ordering Google's break up as a company so that it can never do it again.

ntakasaki• 12 years ago

That would just lead to a shareholder lawsuit and more traffic to DDG, Bing and Blekko.

atmosx2• 12 years ago

Nothing. Google is not Apple or Microsoft. It's not hardware they are selling. There are many positive things but there's a big downside too: A new search engine, is a click away. No one has to sweat about it.

If 5% of the clicks actually like the new search engine, then Google would have lost 5% of it's clients in a day.

shakethemonkey• 12 years ago

This wouldn't fly in the USA:

"It is clear from the record that Google was never named as a party to the suit, was never served with process, never waived or accepted process, and never made an appearance in the suit before the expunction order was entered. Nothing in the record establishes that Google stands in privity to the commission or to Jackson. Accordingly, we hold that Google was not a party to the suit and that the trial court lacked jurisdiction to enter orders against Google." [1]

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140609/07402727525/texas...

jt21903• 12 years ago

The issue is that a lower court issued a temporary injunction against Morgan Jack to stop selling their products in British Columbia while the issue was being sorted out at trial. Morgan Jack then disappeared "into the cloud" and continued to sell their products online, via links to their products in Google search results. Equustek then claimed that Morgan Jack was still in violation of the court order to stop selling in BC, and that's the issue that has gone to the BC Supreme Court: Is Google "doing business" in BC when it presents Morgan Jack's links to BC residents? The court ruled that under the current rules, Google is indeed doing business in BC, and can be ordered to remove links to Morgan Jack by a BC court.

Tyr422• 12 years ago

Earlier, Google already agreed to remove their website, as defined by some 350 urls. But the defendant started auto generating new urls, which had to go back to the judge (I think) to be blocked. Google was fine with blocking specific urls worldwide by court order.

Now, the ruling requires google to block them, even if they change the url. That's the new upgrade that required the ruling.

peeters2• 12 years ago

How about drawing parallels to a similar situation? A child porn ring manages to stay online via using ever-changing URLs and relying on Google's indexing. Prosecutors of course go after the people maintaining the network. But Google still has a moral and legal obligation to stop indexing the network if feasible.

I'd say at the end of the day it's a matter of degree. In both situations, a content provider has been deemed illegal is leveraging Google to stay afloat. But while in one case Google's obligation seems like a no-brainer due to its heinous nature, the other elicits less passion.

opendais• 12 years ago

Using that logic...

Russia can ban all LBGT sites on Google because it has been deemed illegal.

forrestthewoods• 12 years ago

Haha. What a hilariously nonsensical ruling. The United States should quickly issue a ruling that expressly forbids Google from blocking sites in Canada. Then we can fight over it!

As a I would like to see all countries in which Google has an office claim their nation's full tax rate on Google's worldwide revenue. All rates combined I think it might be possible for Google to owe ten dollars in taxes per dollars of revenue.

pjc502• 12 years ago

There's already a US law limiting the extent to which UK libel damages are enforceable.

kps• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act

DanBC3• 12 years ago

What happens to Google if they comply in all of Canada but do not comply for the rest of the world?

It would be cheaper for Google to offer specialist SEO and web design help for these aggrieved parties - "here's how you get your story out and ranked higher than the attack sites" - than to fight legal cases through the courts. Although I am pleased thay're taking the cases to court to defend their position.

tempestn8• 12 years ago

Google was the defendant in this case, so they had little choice but to go to court. Let alone the consequences to their Canadian business, US and Canadian courts cooperate in enforcing judgements, so they couldn't ignore it regardless. (Of course they are choosing to appeal, which is optional but obviously a good idea given the pain this precedent could cause.)

briandh• 12 years ago

Google was the defendant in this case

No they weren't. In fact, the decision linked at the top of the thread specifically refers to Google and Google Canada as "non-parties".

Fuxy• 12 years ago

At this rate google is going to shit.

By the time every court in the world is done removing all the stuff they want the only thing left will be cats.

There won't be any porn though that is too controversial.

PinguTS• 12 years ago

Not that new. Most of the DMCA take down notices are also executed worldwide.

tempestn8• 12 years ago

Good point. Obviously Google does considerably more business in the US than Canada, but it's still bizarre for any one country's courts to make decisions that directly impact the entire world.

Maybe it's time for an international treaty on Internet regulation to spell out exactly what powers any given nation has. (Although such a thing would probably have the potential to go very wrong.)

tomp• 12 years ago

DMCA take downs are only effective because Google is a US company. If I have a company in e.g. Slovenia, DMCA is ineffective, and they would have to go through Slovenian courts to take down the website (unless they just seize the domain).

tempestn8• 12 years ago

Yes and no. Some countries (Canada being one) have treaties with the US that let court judgements in one country be enforced in the other. So even if you have no assets in the US or income from the US, a US court decision could still affect you if you live in such a country.

Of course, most internet companies do do some business in the US.

nknighthb• 12 years ago

DMCA takedowns are not court orders. You're not actually compelled to comply with them at all, but you lose access to the safe harbor provision if you don't.

throwwit• 12 years ago

The Internet is going to become a country-by-country intranet at this rate.

scrrr• 12 years ago

The world wide web. Off topic, but I think we tend to forget that most legislation affects websites. Nothing keeps you from writing your own version of DNS, your own protocol (who says it has to be HTTP) etc. That's the beauty of TCP/IP! :)

toyg5• 12 years ago

They'll just start writing laws regulating TCP/IP instead. They already do in China, after all.

There is no technical answer to this sort of problems.

avz4• 12 years ago

It's not only about free speech. Different cultural, social and economic conditions mean different countries live by different laws.

I don't know the circumstances of the case, but it seems plausible that given an opportunity a German, Emirati, Chinese or Brazilian court may reach a different conclusion as to the legality of Morgan Jack's business. Countries are known to have very different labor and copyright laws. It's plausible that some circumstances (e.g. mistreatment, authorship, limitations on copyright transferability, nuances and even legality of the contract the parties had entered) could make courts elsewhere consider Morgan Jack to be the rightful owner of the design.

What if such a court elsewhere made a contradictory ruling and also demanded from Google that it be enforced worldwide?

caf2• 12 years ago

At a guess, this is the risk you take by doing business in two or more jurisdictions: you might be subjected to two mutually-incompatible rulings, in which case your only alternative is to stop doing business in at least one of those jurisdictions.

avz4• 12 years ago

Assuming courts you deal with don't overreach like the B.C. court just did, you can easily resolve this problem by complying with each law within each respective jurisdiction.

This is made easier by the fact that your company is usually represented by separate local legal entities whose business is within each jurisdiction.

kamjam• 12 years ago

So I am going to assume that the plaintiff will also be filing against Bing, Yahoo and all the other search engines individually too? Cos you know, Google is not the only search engine out there...

toyg5• 12 years ago

It's more likely that, if this trend continues, Google itself will eventually drag competitors through the courts to force them to comply with rules they are forced to obey. Or they might lobby the US Congress or EU Parliament to pass laws that "clarify the position of all search engines".

keithpeter• 12 years ago

It had occurred to me that the (apparent) failure of the plaintiff, the engineering company, to file complaints against the other companies providing search engines might be a factor in an appeal against the injunction by Google.

As others have commented, I suspect something like the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea that replaced a previous court dating from the League of Nations times, may arise.

Meanwhile, the legal profession in Canada will experience a welcome increase in civil law work and fees!

toyg5• 12 years ago

Justice systems the world over have been itching for a way to force this whole interweb thing to fall in line for more than a decade, but they couldn't find a solid-enough target in a quickly-changing landscape. Now that things have matured, they are going after the big established players: Google for search/advertising, Facebook for social activity, Twitter for censorship/regulated speech, Amazon for commerce, Youtube for copyright. It will happen more and more and there is no way around it. The classic cyberpunk countermeasure of finding a friendly nation to hide behind just doesn't work in the long run, as Sweden has proven with the PirateBay case.

It might be an unpopular opinion here, but I believe the rise of a global network will inevitably force the rise of a global government. A higher authority is now necessary to sort out this sort of problems in a consistent way. It's the natural evolution we've seen in the past when trade and knowledge networks reached a dimension where differences in legislation made it too difficult for them to flow. The question is: how do we define this global government? Which interests will it represent in practice? I think it's something we should embrace, because otherwise we will be forced to accept it at the point of a non-metaphorical gun.

mnem• 12 years ago

Why would a justice system care? Or do you mean government?

toyg5• 12 years ago

Imagine you were a judge tasked with ruling on a case like this. You know the rules force you to tell Google to stop acting like it does, but you also know that your laws are supposed to stop at your borders, and in any case forcing such a global operation to comply with your ruling is almost like fighting windmills. Wouldn't that bother you? Of course it would.

tempestn8• 12 years ago

I expect at least in the medium term it will look more like a global (or at least multilateral) treaty, rather than a global government. But I agree that now is the time to think about how we could like such a thing to be structured. As much as some people would like it to be, the internet can't be the new wild west forever. It will be regulated. The hope is to have it regulated in a fair, consistent, and manageable (minimal?) manner.

As a web-based business owner, I find the prospect of having to comply with an increasing list of obscure regulations from various different entities rather overwhelming. Something comprehensive could be a relief, if it's done right. (Of course, there will still be differences between countries, but perhaps an overarching treaty could at least limit their impact.)

gorklin3• 12 years ago

Good luck regulating my encrypted anonymized connection.

avz4• 12 years ago

Variety of laws ensures diversification which protects against and limits the fallout from legal mistakes. It also allows humanity to experiment and learn faster than a single monolithic legal system would permit.

alphapapa• 12 years ago

I think that is one of the principles the United States was supposed to be based upon. However...

mark_l_watson• 12 years ago

I don't much like the idea of a global government either, but in effect that is probably what we will see evolving. Consider: it is the opinion of the IMF that trading blocks are becoming more relevant than governments; facilitated by the planned substitution of SDRs for the US dollar as the world reserve currency. The problem with all this is that the tighter coupling of economies and governances makes everything more brittle, more subject to phase transitions leading to severe problems. Topping it off is too many people believing that current political and environmental problems are cyclical, rather than structural. As an example, printing more money is a temporary bandaid when there are structural problems.

caf2• 12 years ago

You would have to think that ceasing to do business in BC would be an option competitive with accepting rulings like this in the future.

peterarmstrong2• 12 years ago

If you think this is bad, just wait until July 1 and CASL gets introduced. As a Canadian I'd like to apologize for this:

http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2014/25293/how-canadas-a...

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/casl-lcap.htm

phloxicon• 12 years ago

Having consent, a person who can be replied to instead of ano-reply and a mandatory unsubscribe doesn't sound so bad to me. What are the main arguments against it?

peterarmstrong2• 12 years ago

Mandatory unsubscribe is totally fine, obviously.

But CASL includes making confirmation, welcome and update emails opt-in, or else risking an up to $10 million dollar fine.

Yes, really.

Even if you're not a Canadian business, this will apply to you if you email Canadians.

Yes, really.

Say goodbye to your opt-out email drip courses.

kp25• 12 years ago

Is Canadian court trying to change the definition of so called "Internet"..? This is insane.

chatmasta• 12 years ago

The article is quite sparse on details of what, exactly the website is selling. Has anyone found a link to it?

paulgb2• 12 years ago

Plaintiff: http://www.equustek.com/

Defendant: http://www.gw1000.com/

austerity• 12 years ago

This shit needs to end. Even the obvious jurisdiction overreach aside, what happened is the court ordering Google - a party not in any way involved in the conflict at hand - to withhold information from the public. The idea that this "western" form of censorship is in any way better than, say, the blocks on porn in Pakistan or political censorship in Russia is either extremely short-sighted or simply serves somebody's interests (as in case of the plaintiff lawyer here). How it is OK for anyone to have such authority is beyond me.

blueskin_• 12 years ago

Does anyone know what this censored site is? Time for some Streisand Effect.

quasque• 12 years ago

Apparently it's any site that sells the "Datalink GW1000".

cmajewsk• 12 years ago

Why only google? is that the only search engine that displays those links?

paulgb2• 12 years ago

Direct link to the ruling: http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/SC/14/10/2014BCSC1063.ht...

jt21903• 12 years ago

The ruling is very clearly written, and does an excellent job of explaining the difficulty the British Columbia Supreme Court is was faced with in this decision.

Tyr422• 12 years ago

Thank you. That is a good read.

ertdfgcb• 12 years ago

What happens if Google just says no? Fines?

atmosx2• 12 years ago

Hahahaha, that would be a good one. Probably extremely high fines. It's not the way a democracy works to say no. The appeal was the only sensible way to go.

The problem is not this case per se. The problem Google faces is the precedent. If this goes through, every one who thinks that there is an irregularity about a website will go to court in order to bring it down from google.

If many websites stop being listed on Google, people might start looking for new search engines and... You can imagine how the story goes from there...

jt21903• 12 years ago

tl;dr British Columbia Supreme Court determines that Google is conducting business in British Columbia, despite no servers, facilities or employees in the province, and can be ordered to remove links that infringe on the plaintiff's intellectual property rights.

bane• 12 years ago

"No"

now what?

Sorry Canada, I like you guys, but you don't really get to make rulings for everybody else.

jacquesm6• 12 years ago

I fail to see how this judgment is any different from those where the courts ordered ISPs to block sites like the piratebay. If you're ok with one kind of interference about third parties linking to stuff you should probably be ok with all of them, and if you're against interference in this case you should probably be against interference in general.

It's very hard to argue consistently that the one is ok and the other is not. I strongly believe any kind of interference is bad. If you have beef with someone sue them, don't involve the facilitator.

phantom784• 12 years ago

I think the difference here is that the court is asking Google to remove the links worldwide, not just for people accessing Google from within Canada.

jacquesm6• 12 years ago

There was a similar case a few years ago with Yahoo vs France, iirc France prevailed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/04/news/04iht-yahoo.2.t.html

sigzero• 12 years ago

I am pretty sure Google is not going to comply.

Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

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