Google, Canadian company in global e-commerce wrangle
Internet censorship, corporate IP integrity at core of Supreme Court trademark fight
When a competitor steals your intellectual property and starts selling it as his, you hire a lawyer, go to court and get an injunction – possibly even a sizable award for trademark or patent infringement.
But what happens when your competitor flouts court orders, goes underground – continually morphing and moving – and continues to sell a knockoff of the proprietary product you developed?
That’s the dilemma the courts and Vancouver industrial automation technology maker Equustek Solutions Inc. wrestled with when a former distributor, Morgan Jack of Datalink Technologies Gateways, also based in Vancouver, allegedly partnered with a former Equustek engineer to develop and sell a counterfeit product, in violation of Equustek’s trademark.
The allegations have not been proved in court, and a civil action is still pending. But the courts have recognised the violation of Equustek’s intellectual property rights and Jack did not stick around to defend himself.
He disappeared, and yet he apparently continues to sell the Equustek clone online.
Despite multiple cease-and-desist orders issued by the courts, Jack/Datalink simply went underground and continued to sell the device – an industrial automation controller called the GW1000 – online via multiple websites. So Equustek went after the one entity that has the power to shut down a scofflaw whose only conduit to customers appears to be an IP address: Google.