This past June the Supreme Court of Canada released a decision involving the application of a worldwide injunction, Equustek v Google. The decision resulted from a dispute that Equustek was having with a rogue competitor that was stealing their material and selling it under their own name. While legal proceedings against the competitor were on-going, Equustek turned to Google with the argument that it was Google's indexing of the competitor that enabled it to sell the stolen material on-line. Indexing, referring to the way in which Google presents listed material results after a Google search, was responsible for the competitor appearing in searches for Equustek's products. Equustek argued that if Google stopped listing the competitor in such searches, the competitor would be thwarted in its sales of the stolen materials.

The legal route that Equustek took against Google was to seek an injunction requiring Google to change how it indexed its search results. In order for this to have a practical effect, it was ordered that Google would have to change its search engine results worldwide. Google had previously stopped listing the competitor on Google.ca searches, but this was proving ineffective to stop the sales, as the majority were not in Canada. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the lower courts' decision that it was appropriate in the circumstances to grant an injunction with uncircumscribed extraterritorial effect against a non-party. Part of the rationale for this decision was that the court found there was no comity infringement based on the evidence presented; no reasonable chance that another nation would be offended by the injunction.

From the Canadian perspective the broad extraterritorial reach was required to effect a responsive remedy in the Internet era. Anything less than a worldwide injunction would have proved ineffective and worthless.

However, the ruling from Canada's highest court did not end the dispute. In response to the injunction Equustek obtained, Google went to a court in California to obtain its own injunction against that order. The Californian court granted the requested injunction stating that the Canadian order threatened free speech and interfered with the immunity that a domestic statute provided service providers such as Google.

This is an interesting ruling from the perspective of comity and corporate jurisdiction in the Internet era. Typically comity is afforded to the decisions of foreign jurisdictions where there have not been gross procedural injustices. Mutual respect for the judicial bodies should mean that their decisions are recognized. Yet comity was not afforded to Canada's highest court in this matter. This case further speaks to how well laws on jurisdiction are able to respond to global corporations. Where the Internet enables corporations to work boundlessly, perhaps the chosen jurisdiction of incorporation matters less and less. If Equustek is not able to rely on and enforce the injunction, it will require a great deal more of litigation in a variety of jurisdictions to actually prevent the competitor from selling its products on-line.

Interestingly, obtaining this injunction will prevent Equustek from enforcing its Canadian order in the United States, but would not prevent a Canadian court from holding Google in contempt of its order.

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