Google seeks to lift B.C. court injunction blocking website access
A lawyer for Google was in B.C. Supreme Court on 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 another company, Datalink Technologies Gateways Inc., which is accused of trademark infringement and unlawful appropriation of trade secrets.
In 2014, the B.C. Supreme Court ordered that Google, which is not a party to the dispute and is not alleged to have acted unlawfully, be prohibited from delivering results on its internet search engine pointing to Datalink’s websites.
Google, which is a part of Alphabet Inc., does not charge users for its search engine. Instead, it earns money by displaying advertising along with search results.
The California-based company, which employs several dozen people to remove web pages it considers offensive, appealed the ruling, arguing 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 in June last year, the nation’s highest court upheld the injunction.
Then in November last year, a California judge found the Canadian courts had overstepped their bounds and had violated the right to free speech online.
On Tuesday, Tracey Cohen, a lawyer for Google, told a B.C. judge that the internet search engine was entitled to have the injunction order reviewed if there were material changes in the case.
She told B.C. Supreme Court Judge Nathan Smith that the ruling from California was one such change, arguing it called for the injunction to be discharged or varied.
Cohen also argued the injunction was ineffective because the defendant company sold 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 released Tuesday. “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 that 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 said.
Regarding the U.S. court ruling, Fleming said it didn’t matter that an American judge found Google was being harmed, since the evidence in the Canadian courts was that it clearly was not being harmed.
Fleming ’s arguments are expected to continue today.
Equustek designs, manufactures and sells industrial network interface hardware and alleges that Datalink, a former Vancouver company that at one time distributed Equustek products, designed and sold counterfeit versions of their hardware.
A trial that will deal with the issues between the two companies is scheduled to get underway next month.