High Court Judgment Template

whole market, of preventing the infringers carrying on their business from any location in the world on the primary digital platform through which they seek to market their infringing goods. The infringers whose activities are impeded by the injunctions are usually beyond the territorial jurisdiction of the English court. Indeed that is a principal justification for the grant of an injunction against the ISPs. 164. Viewed in that way, internet blocking orders are in substance more of a precedent or jumping-off point for the development of newcomer injunctions than might at first sight appear. They demonstrate the imaginative way in which equity has provided an effective remedy for the protection and enforcement of civil rights, where conventional means of proceeding against the wrongdoers are impracticable or ineffective, where the objective of protecting the integrity or effectiveness of related court process is absent, and where the risk of injustice of a without notice order as against alleged wrongdoers is regarded as sufficiently met by the preservation of liberty to them to apply to have the order discharged. 165. We have considered but rejected summary possession orders against squatters as an informative precedent. This summary procedure (avoiding any interim order followed by final order after trial) was originally provided for by RSC Order 113, and is now to be found in CPR Part 55. It is commonly obtained against persons unknown, and has effect against newcomers in the sense that in executing the order the bailiff will remove not merely squatters present when the order was made, but also squatters who arrived on the relevant land thereafter, unless they apply to be joined as defendants to assert a right of their own to remain. 166. Tempting though the superficial similarities may be as between possession orders against squatters and injunctions against newcomers, they afford no relevant precedent for the following reasons. First, they are the creature of the common law rather than equity, being a modern form of the old action in ejectment which is at its heart an action in rem rather than in personam: see Manchester Corpn v Connolly [1970] Ch 420 , 428-9 per Lord Diplock, McPhail v Persons, Names Unknown [1973] Ch 447, 457 per Lord Denning MR and more recently Meier , paras 33-36 per Lady Hale. Secondly, possession orders of this kind are not truly injunctions. They authorise a court official to remove persons from land, but disobedience to the bailiff does not sound in contempt. Thirdly, the possession order works once and for all by a form of execution which puts the owner of the land back in possession, but it has no ongoing effect in prohibiting entry by newcomers wishing to camp upon it after the order has been executed. Its shortcomings in the Traveller context are one of the reasons prayed in aid by local authorities seeking injunctions against newcomers as the only practicable solution to their difficulties.

167. These considerations lead us to the conclusion that, although the attempts thus far to justify them are in many respects unsatisfactory, there is no immoveable obstacle in

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