Google continues its fight to lift B.C. Supreme Court injunction
A lawyer for Google was in B.C. Supreme Court Tuesday seeking to lift an injunction imposed more than three years ago to block a number of websites that are allegedly operating illegally and harming a B.C. company.
The case involving the internet giant relates to a dispute between Burnaby-based Equustek Solutions Inc. and Datalink Technologies Gateways Inc., which is accused of trademark infringement and unlawful appropriation of trade secrets.
In 2014, the B.C. Supreme Court ordered Google, which is not a party to the dispute and not alleged to have acted unlawfully, be prohibited from delivering results on its search engine pointing to Datalink’s websites. Google, which does not charge users for its search engine and instead earns its money by displaying advertising along with the search results, appealed the ruling.
The California-based company, which employs several dozen people to remove web pages it considers offensive, argued the injunction was beyond the jurisdiction of a B.C. court, improperly operated against an innocent third party and had an “impermissible” territorial reach.
But in June 2015, the B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the unprecedented worldwide injunction on the search engine.
The company appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada and the nation’s highest court upheld the injunction in June 2017.
Then in November, a California judge found the Canadian courts had overstepped their bounds and violated the right to free speech online.
On Tuesday, Tracey Cohen, a lawyer for Google, told a B.C. judge the company was entitled to have the injunction order reviewed if there were material changes in the case.
She told B.C. Supreme Court Justice Nathan Smith the U.S. ruling was one such material change that called for the injunction to be discharged or varied.
Cohen also argued the injunction was ineffective because the defendant company was selling products through Amazon and eBay and had websites that were being accessed through other search engines.
“We’re taking this court action to defend the legal principle that one country shouldn’t be able to decide what information people in other countries can access online,” David Price, senior product counsel at Google, said in a statement. “Undermining this core principle invariably leads to a world where internet users are subject to the most restrictive content limitations from every country.”
Robert Fleming, a lawyer for Equustek, told the judge nothing had changed since the original court decision on the injunction. He argued Google was making the same arguments it had before.
“Almost everything you have heard today has been heard by one of the three levels of court before.”
Fleming’s arguments are expected to continue Wednesday.