Canada’s Supreme Court upholds lower court ruling on Google web search

Canada's Supreme Court yesterday upheld a British Columbia court ruling which required Google to de-list entire domains and websites from its global search index.

The 7-2 landmark ruling was delivered in a case Google vs Equustek, which started when British Columbia based technology company Equustek Solutions accused distributor Datalink Technology Gateways of relabeling one of its products and selling it as their own online.

Equustek further claimed Datalink acquired trade secrets for creating a similar competing product. Datalink initially denied the allegations and then fled the province, and continued business operations, mostly outside of Canada. Datalink representatives did not appear in court, and Equustek won default judgment.

Though the lawsuit did not directly name Google, Equustek requested that the search engine remove Datalink search results until the allegations could be tested, which Google did on a voluntary basis, and de-indexed over 300 websites associated with Datalink, but only on the Canadian version of the search engine.

The Supreme Court of British Columbia later accepted Equustek's request for a broadened injunction and asked Google to stop displaying search results globally for any Datalink websites.

Google appealed against the broadened injunction in the Supreme Court of Canada. The court, ruling in favour of Equustek, rejected Google's argument that the right to freedom of expression should have prevented the order from being issued.

Meanwhile, commentators say the ruling could threaten free expression on the internet.

The Supreme Court upheld the lower-court ruling that blocking search results for pirated gear only on Google's Canada site, Google.ca, would do little to prevent potential customers from finding the gear.

The search results would still be seen on their country's version of Google.

"The Internet has no borders -- its natural habitat is global," the supreme court wrote. "If the injunction were restricted to Canada alone or to google.ca, the remedy would be deprived of its intended ability to prevent irreparable harm."