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Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

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Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#71

Post by vidarh »

avz wrote: post #30
caf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Jurisdiction does not (necessarily) follow national borders.

The US claims jurisdiction over US citizens worldwide for certain tax matters, for example.

And Norway has laws intended to let Norwegian courts pursue residents that travel abroad to take advantage of legal systems that are bad at pursuing sex crimes against children even though the crime takes part outside Norwegian borders.

Many countries have laws for which the courts jurisdiction is either worldwide, or substantially different from the national borders.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#72

Post by ntakasaki »

Natsu wrote: post #13
bambax wrote: post #2

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 t…

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...)

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

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

johnchristopher wrote: post #6
bambax wrote: post #2

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 t…

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 sel…

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.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#74

Post by jt2190 »

paulgb wrote: post #63

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

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.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#75

Post by jt2190 »

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.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#76

Post by atmosx »

Natsu wrote: post #13
bambax wrote: post #2

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 t…

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...)

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.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#78

Post by jacquesm »

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.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#80

Post by atmosx »

ertdfgcb wrote: post #68

What happens if Google just says no? Fines?

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...

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