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It's not only about free speech. Different cultural, social and economic conditions mean different countries live by different laws.

I don't know the circumstances of the case, but it seems plausible that given an opportunity a German, Emirati, Chinese or Brazilian court may reach a different conclusion as to the legality of Morgan Jack's business. Countries are known to have very different labor and copyright laws. It's plausible that some circumstances (e.g. mistreatment, authorship, limitations on copyright transferability, nuances and even legality of the contract the parties had entered) could make courts elsewhere consider Morgan Jack to be the rightful owner of the design.

What if such a court elsewhere made a contradictory ruling and also demanded from Google that it be enforced worldwide?



At a guess, this is the risk you take by doing business in two or more jurisdictions: you might be subjected to two mutually-incompatible rulings, in which case your only alternative is to stop doing business in at least one of those jurisdictions.


Assuming courts you deal with don't overreach like the B.C. court just did, you can easily resolve this problem by complying with each law within each respective jurisdiction.

This is made easier by the fact that your company is usually represented by separate local legal entities whose business is within each jurisdiction.


Which jurisdiction is a web page in? Where it's hosted, where it's controlled from, where its ads are served from, where it's read, where its payment processing is done?


A website may be complex enough and distributed enough to straddle multiple jurisdictions (this isn't an entirely new situation though since similar issues came up with radio spectrum regulations).

The bottom line is this: your jurisdiction extends as far as your control. A court may be able to issue injunctions against the systems which are located on its jurisdiction which may only be a subset of systems supporting a given site. In places where it is legal, it may also censor the internet. If everything from hosting, through advertising, payments and readership are outside the jurisdiction then it can do nothing directly and must resort to seeking assistance from foreign jurisdictions. I'd say in those situations it is entirely appropriate.


Jurisdiction does not (necessarily) follow national borders.

The US claims jurisdiction over US citizens worldwide for certain tax matters, for example.

And Norway has laws intended to let Norwegian courts pursue residents that travel abroad to take advantage of legal systems that are bad at pursuing sex crimes against children even though the crime takes part outside Norwegian borders.

Many countries have laws for which the courts jurisdiction is either worldwide, or substantially different from the national borders.




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