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A Quebec Superior Court judge is being asked to decide whether Quebec’s Registraire des enterprises has the power to order a private company to stop using public data gathered from the Registraire’s website.

OpenCorporates maintains a searchable database of information on businesses around the world, data it gathers from government’s corporate registers.

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Because its database is international and easily searchable, OpenCorporates has become a popular tool for journalists — including at the Montreal Gazette — investigating things like international money laundering and the links between numbered companies and organized crime figures.

But the Registraire says its use of Quebec data is illegal. The Registraire maintains that it’s the only organization legally allowed to have a copy of Quebec’s corporate registry.

While OpenCorporates stopped gathering data from Quebec’s corporate register in 2016, when the Registraire ordered it to stop and changed the terms and conditions on its website, it is seeking a declarative judgment establishing that the Registraire can’t control how it uses the data it has already gathered.