This should prove interesting. Google recently lost a court case in Canada, and the Canadian court’s ruling was that particular websites which happen to be infringing on intellectual property rights must be stricken from Google’s indices – world-wide. Eriq Gardner opines in the Hollywood Reporter:
It’d be one thing if this were China, and the Communists were ordering the censoring of politically unfavorable information. In such a case, Google could walk away from the market. That’s exactly what happened in 2010.
But this was Canada, for gosh sake. What would be next? Hollywood forum-shopping its piracy cleanup north of the border? Or how about Europe looking to impose a “right to be forgotten” worldwide? Survey says.
So what’s Google doing now?
The company has filed a lawsuit in California federal court against Equustek.
“Google brings this action to prevent enforcement in the United States of a Canadian order that prohibits Google from publishing within the United States search result information about the contents of the internet,” states the introduction in the complaint (read here, courtesy of Wired).
A federal judge can now give Google what it requests by issuing a declaration that the injunction is unenforceable as inconsistent with the First Amendment, the Communications Decency Act and international comity, but does it matter? What a U.S. judge can’t do is stop a Canadian court from imposing sanctions on Google for failure to comply with the injunction.
I’ll bet Equustek wasn’t exactly pleased to see nouveau-behemoth Google calling it into the court. But, of course, this is an embodiment of the inevitable clash of a naturally global entity with the artificial lines of nation-states. As noted before, what happens when an authoritarian state court issues a demand to Google that it take something out world-wide? Does the Internet then become the playground of the liberal (we hope it’s still liberal) West?
