2017 January 25

Niemela v Malamus,  2017 BCSC 260

The British Columbia Supreme Court ordered that the defendants take down the content of postings on the Internet which the court was satisfied were defamatory of the plaintiff.  Google Inc., which was not a party to this lawsuit, received notice of the plaintiff’s application and its counsel appeared at the application on behalf of Google.  The court noted that Google had a voluntary policy pursuant to which in the past it had been prepared to block URLs if a defendant fails to comply with a court order that a URL be removed. “So while there has been no representation on behalf of Google Inc. that it will follow that policy in this case, there appears to be a good chance that it may choose to do so.”  Counsel for Google clarified: “Google’s policy applies to removing or de-indexing URLs from Google.ca, the Canadian version of the search engine, not from “.com”.”