High court upholds Google content ban
Search giant may not display sites of a company accused of counterfeiting Canadian tech
OTTAWA— It’s a global ban that has stunned free speech advocates.
The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled Google is barred from displaying anywhere in the world the websites of a company accused of counterfeiting a Canadian technology company’s products.
The 7-2 ruling has broad implications for freedom of expression, the reach of courts to protect intellectual property and other rights and for the operations of Internet-based businesses.
In upholding a B.C. lower court injunction against Google’s ability to display commercial content that was at the heart of a court battle over trade secrets, the country’s top court may make Google a more powerful player in the information marketplace worldwide, said University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist.
“The decision will ultimately grant Google more power, not less,” Geist wrote in an online analysis of the decision. “What happens if a Chinese court orders it to remove Taiwanese sites from the index? Or if an Iranian court orders it to remove gay and lesbian sites from the index?”
Justices Suzanne Côté and Malcolm Rowe dissented, saying the case called for “judicial restraint.”
The two judges said although the original injunction was meant to stop immediate harm to the Canadian company until the counterfeiting and trademark infringement claim could be determined by the courts, “the order against Google . . . is final in effect.” The majority on the Supreme Court of Canada, which upheld two lower B.C. court orders, rejected all of Google’s arguments.
“This is not an order to remove speech that, on its face, engages freedom of expression values; it is an order to de-index websites that are in violation of several court orders. We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods,” Justice Rosalie Abella wrote.
It’s the second hard-hitting ruling against Google in two days. On Tuesday, European authorities hammered Google for using its dominance in online searches to direct customers to its own businesses and fined the tech giant about $3.6 billion.
On Wednesday, Google said little in response to the Supreme Court ruling. “We are carefully reviewing the court’s findings and evaluating our next steps,” Google spokesperson Aaron Brindle said.
Wednesday’s ruling involved Equustek Solutions Inc., a Vancouverbased manufacturer of networking devices that allow complex industrial equipment made by one manufacturer to communicate with the equipment of another, a kind of interlinking technology.
In 2011 it got into a messy dispute when its distributor, Datalink Technologies Gateways Inc., began to relabel one of the products and passed it off as its own. Equustek claims Datalink then acquired some of its confidential technology and began to manufacture copycat products. Sued by Equustek, Datalink first denied the accusations, then fled the province, and continued to carry on business, selling products all over the world from an unknown location.
Several court orders were issued against Datalink to stop selling Equustek inventory until the allegations could be tested.
Equustek asked Google to drop Datalink from its search engines. Google said it would comply with a court order, and removed or “de-indexed” 345 web pages, but not Datalink’s websites. Datalink was able to move “the objectionable content” to new pages within its websites. And Google had only blocked the searches on Google.ca, not Google.com or its other country-specific search engines.