160. Protection of the court’s process from abuse, or preservation of the utility of its future orders, may fairly be said to be the bedrock of many of equity’s forays into new forms of injunction. Thus freezing injunctions are designed to make more effective the enforcement of any ultimate money judgment: see Broad Idea at paras 11-21. This is what Lord Leggatt there called the enforcement principle. Search orders are designed to prevent dishonest defendants from destroying relevant documents in advance of the formal process of disclosure. Norwich Pharmacal orders are a form of advance third party disclosure designed to enable a claimant to identify and then sue the wrongdoer. Anti-suit injunctions preserve the integrity of the appropriate forum from forum shopping by parties preferring without justification to litigate elsewhere. 161. But internet blocking orders (para 49 above) stand in a different category. The applicant intellectual property owner does not seek assistance from internet service providers (“ISPs”) to enable it to identify and then sue the wrongdoers. It seeks an injunction against the ISP because it is a much more efficient way of protecting its intellectual property rights than suing the numerous wrongdoers, even though it is no part of its case against the ISP that it is, or has even threatened to be, itself a wrongdoer. The injunction is based upon the application of “ordinary principles of equity”: see Cartier (para 20 above) per Lord Sumption at para 15. Specifically, the principle is that, once notified of the selling of infringing goods through its network, the ISP comes under a duty, but only if so requested by the court, to prevent the use of its facilities to facilitate a wrong by the sellers. The proceedings against the ISP may be the only proceedings which the intellectual property owner intends to take. Proceedings directly against the wrongdoers are usually impracticable, because of difficulty in identifying the operators of the infringing websites, their number and their location, typically in places outside the jurisdiction of the court: see per Arnold J at first instance in Cartier [2014] EWHC 3354 (Ch); [2015] Bus LR 298; [2015] RPC 7 at para 198. 162. The effect of an internet blocking order, or the cumulative effect of such orders against ISPs which share most of the relevant market, is therefore to hinder the wrongdoers from pursuing their infringing sales on the internet, without them ever being named or joined as defendants in the proceedings or otherwise given a procedural opportunity to advance any defence, other than by way of liberty to apply to vary or discharge the order: see again per Arnold J at para 262. 163. Although therefore internet blocking orders are not in form injunctions against persons unknown, they do in substance share many of the supposedly objectionable features of newcomer injunctions, if viewed from the perspective of those (the infringers) whose wrongdoings are in substance sought to be restrained. They are, quoad the wrongdoers, made without notice. They are not granted to hold the ring pending joinder of the wrongdoers and a subsequent interim hearing on notice, still less a trial. The proceedings in which they are made are, albeit in a sense indirectly, a form of enforcement of rights which are not seriously in dispute, rather than a means of dispute resolution. They have the effect, when made against the ISPs who control almost the
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