It just came to my attention that an ex parte injunction against the author of allegedly defamatory works, Go Daddy as the domain name provider and Google for providing search functionality, which I previously reported, has been dissolved.

The British Columbia Court in Nazerali v. Mitchell, 2011 BCSC 1846, heard submissions on extending the injunction. The judge considered the defenses to defamation raised by the individual defendant and the breadth of the injunction in the decision.

The Judge held:

[7] What this means is that Justice Grauer appears to have focused his attention solely on the question of whether a jury would have made a finding or would be compelled to reach a conclusion that the words complained of were defamatory, and Justice Grauer did not consider, in the words of the Supreme Court of Canada in Canadian Liberty Net, whether the words were impossible to justify such that the trial judge’s acceptance of a defence of justification would, of necessity, have to be set aside as perverse.

[8] Now, I will come back to that momentarily.  I also would be concerned with the substance of the order granted by Justice Grauer in the sense of its breadth.  It appears to me that the Deep Capture website consisted of significantly more than the article by Mr. Mitchell which is complained of, and the term of the order which effectively shut down the Deep Capture website was, I believe, unnecessarily broad.

In the earlier  decision, Nazerali v. Mitchell, 2011 BCSC 1581, the Justice Grauer had granted a temporary ex parte injunction taking the website off the Internet.

The decision is dated December 13, 2011 but only seems to have been added to CanLII recently.