Law360 Canada ( June 28, 2017, 3:16 PM EDT) -- Appeal by Google Inc. (Google) from a judgment of the British Columbia Court of Appeal affirming an interlocutory injunction granted against Google in the respondents’ favour. The respondent Equustek Solutions Inc. (Equustek) was a small technology company in British Columbia. It manufactured networking devices that allowed complex industrial equipment made by one manufacturer to communicate with complex industrial equipment made by another manufacturer. Equustek claimed that another company, Datalink Technologies Gateways Inc. (Datalink), while acting as a distributor of Equustek’s products, began to re-label one of the products and pass it off as its own. Equustek also claimed that Datalink acquired confidential information and trade secrets belonging to Equustek, using them to design and manufacture a competing product, the GW1000. Any orders for Equustek’s product were filled with the GW1000. Consequently, in 2011, Equustek terminated the distribution agreement it had with Datalink. Datalink subsequently failed to comply with court orders which, among other things, prohibited it from referring to Equustek or any of Equustek’s products on its websites and required it to post a statement on its websites informing customers that Datalink was no longer a distributor of Equustek products. Datalink continued to carry on its business from an unknown location, selling its impugned product on its websites all over the world. Further court proceedings by Equustek against Datalink and its principal proved to be ineffective, as well as steps taken by Google, a non-party, to de-index specific webpages associated with Datalink. Equustek discovered that Datalink simply moved the objectionable content to new pages within its websites, circumventing the court orders. The de-indexing also did not have the necessary protective effect since Google had limited the de-indexing to searches conducted on google.ca. Accordingly, Equustek sought and obtained an interlocutory injunction enjoining Google from displaying any part of the Datalink websites on any of its search results worldwide. The British Columbia Court of Appeal dismissed Google’s appeal, concluding that the Court had in personam jurisdiction over Google and could therefore make an order with extraterritorial effect. The Appeal Court also upheld the lower court’s ruling that courts of inherent jurisdiction could grant equitable relief against non-parties. It further found that upholding the interlocutory injunction against Google was the only practical way to prevent Datalink from flouting court orders and that there were no identifiable countervailing comity or freedom of expression concerns that prevented such an order from being granted....