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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

#91
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can have you imprisoned in under a day. Only if you're in their jurisdiction. And Google isn't a person to jail. And corporations have a way of making these things not attributable to any one person. However, it would be better to state the argument given by the law professor in the article: "what happens if a Russian court orders Google to remove gay and lesbian sites from its database". Find something that the…

And Google isn't a person to jail. Which nicely illustrates one of the major problems of having granted corporations 'legal person' status: the punishments for various crimes were originally intended to punish natural persons and have never been sufficiently adapted to punish corporations. What's a proper punishment for flagrant contempt of the court by a corporation? And corporations have a way of making these thing…

> That is in fact their raison d'être.

This looks like an example of @ziobrando's "Bullshit asymmetry principle" in action. You whip out some bullshit (unless I'm really misunderstanding what you are saying) in a one liner with no citations, but to refute it, someone would have to talk about the history of corporations, legal theories around them, compare and contrast with societies that never developed a similar idea (an interesting take on things: http://www.amazon.com/Long-Divergence-Islamic-Held-Middle-eb... ), and so on and so forth. That's a lot more effort than simply spouting some snark.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#92

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 oth…

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.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#93
post #22

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, Youtu…

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.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#95
post #46
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, out and out Contempt of Court. Further, the Judge themselves is in charge of deciding whether Contempt of Court has occurred. No possible jury to convince or appeal to, just the judge. They can have you imprisoned in under a day. Contempt of Court is very serious.

They can have you imprisoned in under a day. Only if you're in their jurisdiction. And Google isn't a person to jail. And corporations have a way of making these things not attributable to any one person. However, it would be better to state the argument given by the law professor in the article: "what happens if a Russian court orders Google to remove gay and lesbian sites from its database". Find something that the…

Russia mostly uses Yandex anyway :)

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#96
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, out and out Contempt of Court. Further, the Judge themselves is in charge of deciding whether Contempt of Court has occurred. No possible jury to convince or appeal to, just the judge. They can have you imprisoned in under a day. Contempt of Court is very serious.

Contempt of the law by the judge should be a defense against contempt of court. In an ideal world, that is.

The lawyers made a compelling case that the law allows for the actions taken by the course, so the judge followed it. That's how the court system works.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#97

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 oth…

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.

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

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#98
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…

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.

Re: Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide

#99
post #5

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 re…

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

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