How easy is it to get an injunction against Google? In Nazerali v. Mitchell, a man complained of online defamation, and obtained a preliminary injunction against the author of the allegedly defamatory content, the hosting company (Nozone, Inc.), the domain name registrar (GoDaddy) and Google. The Court ordered the injunction, which included the order prohibiting Google “from permitting the Google.com or Google.ca search engines from returning any search result from www.deepcapture.com.”  Essentially this results in shutting down the (allegedly) offending website, since the court considered it “impossible surgically to eliminate just the offending phrases”. While this seems to be a dramatic result, considering it was obtained on an ex-parte basis (the other side did not appear at the hearing), it is not without precedent in Canada.

In Canadian National Railway Company v. Google Inc., 2010 ONSC 3121 (CanLII), the court issued an interim injunction requiring Google to remove a blog hosted on Google’s Blogspot platform.

The injunction in Nazerali v. Mitchell was time-limited and is set to expire tomorrow (December 2).

Hat tip to Alan Macek for highlighting this case.

Calgary – 07:00 MST