Earlier this year, a small Vancouver software firm called Equustek earned an extraordinary legal win against Google. The Supreme Court of Canada ordered the search giant to de-index all pages from a former Equustek distributor—not just in Canada, but worldwide.
Google's response to that was to file a lawsuit in US federal court asking a judge to rule that the Canadian order is unenforceable in its home country. Google called the Canadian order "repugnant" to the First Amendment, and it pointed out that the Canadian plaintiffs "never established any violation of their rights under US law."
It looks like Google is going to win that case, but not as a result of any high-minded legal arguments. Its opponent simply failed to show up. In a motion (PDF) filed Tuesday, Google said that Equustek CEO Robert Angus faxed Google's lawyers a letter "stating that Defendants would not be defending this action."
Equustek hasn't hired a US lawyer or shown up to any court proceeding, so Google will move for a default judgment. The company will then ask for a permanent injunction, preventing the Canadian order from being enforced in the US.
Neither Equustek nor Google responded to requests for comment from Ars about the matter.
While it's ultimately unknown why Equustek chose not to defend this case, it's likely that the company simply didn't want to spend the time, energy, and money that would be required to defend a case in a foreign jurisdiction. It also is a huge reach to imagine that the same legal logic that won Equustek a 7-2 vote in Canada's Supreme Court would have held up in US courts, where judges would consider search results speech that has First Amendment protections.
Equustek never sued Google directly. Rather, it sued a former distributor called Datalink Technologies. Equustek accused Datalink of illegally re-labeling products and stealing Equustek intellectual property to make its own products. Datalink initially denied those allegations, but then the company left the province. As of earlier this year, it continued to do business, selling its products worldwide from an unknown location, according to Canadian court rulings.
Google won many non-profit allies in its long battle against Equustek's attempt to get global restrictions on search, including the BC Civil Liberties Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Wikimedia Foundation. All of those groups considered the Canadian Equustek ruling a threat to online freedoms.
Culled: Arstechnica.
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