Internet Censorship or Judicial Overreach :Â Canadian Court Forces Google to Block its Websites Globally
It all began a year ago where a lower court ruled that Google needed to block access to a website globally in a troublesome lawsuit filed against them. The case involved one company charging another of selling copied equipment or counterfeit, and even though Google was not even a party to the case, was directed by the court to make sure no one could find the site in question via Google anywhere in the world.
Now, a year later, the appeals court has again ruled against Google, using the same reasoning that the lower court did citing that since Google is available in British Columbia, the court has jurisdiction, and seems it is looking to stop what it considers to be illegal actions from reaching Canada’s shores, it has every right to order Google to block things worldwide.
In what RIAA and MPAA have been trying to attain by pushing all kinds of ridiculous lawsuits at the company, and even making efforts to push SOPA past the US government, two silly Canadian companies have achieved in a quarrel totally not related to online censorship or piracy.
A quick recap regarding the whole affair that started when Morgan Jack, a former business partner of Equustek Solutions, set up Datalink Technologies Gateways and started Equustek networking routers under a different name under his own brand.
Equustek, who sued Datalink, won the case but were not happy. It then sued Google and wanted all links leading to the Datalink website to be taken off from the company’s search results.
Google agreed and removed the links in question; however, only from its Canadian .ca extension. Equustek still not satisfied, sued Google again and in 2014 won and got a court to push Google to take off the links in question from all of its domains.
Google appealed again. But the company lost the appeal this Friday and is now confronting one final solution before having to agree with the court’s ruling, and that’s the Supreme Court of Canada.
It will set a legal precedent for other business if Google does not win, and all type of business can begin legal proceedings against the company in any Canadian court and have it remove all the links they want to be taken off the Internet.
Of course, this includes RIAA and MPAA, who have been for years wanting to remove pirate sites from search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing, but have never been able to get even slightly close to what these two Canadian manufacturers of networking equipment have been able to do.
It has been a terrible week for Google. In a similar matter, it has been mentioned by the French agency CNIL talking about the way it puts into effect the Right to Be Forgotten law (RTBFL) in the EU.
It seems like the French are not happy with Google, as the company is taking off links that fall under RTBFL only from its .fr domain, and not from the search results that appear on all of its other extensions. Google has been officially given 15 days notice by CNIL to take off the URLs world-wide, or it will be authorized according to French law.
