Judge orders usenet provider to provide uploader customer data
The judge has ruled that hosting provider Abavia must provide the customer data of three uploaders to usenet provider XS News. XS News wants this data because Stichting Brein has ordered both providers to hand over the data of the uploaders.
This concerns the customer data of three XS News customers, who are known as uploaders under the aliases ‘Hannes3’, ‘QoQ’ and ‘Bassie10′. At the end of last year, Brein won summary proceedings against a customer of XS News, the usenet provider Newsconnection, in which this company was ordered to provide the uploaders’ data on pain of a penalty. Newsconnection appealed.
Brein also wrote to Abavia in February 2017 to provide the data. Abavia refused to provide the UserID and the IP addresses. Brein then asked XS News to provide the data. XS News itself did not have this information at its disposal and subsequently demanded that Abavia provide the data to Brein. This turned out to be in vain, after which Brein ordered both XS News and Abavia to hand over, with the foundation sending a draft summons to both companies. In order to be able to comply with this summons from Brein, XS News has demanded that Abavia provide the data in preliminary relief proceedings.
The judge upheld XS News’ claim. This involved balancing the interests of both parties. The importance of XS News is that, if a judge is assigned, this company will be able to comply with Brein’s summons, and thus be able to escape a summons and lawsuit instituted by Brein. The interest of Abavia in refusing to provide data lies in the view that the company does not want to provide the data of Usenet users to third parties lightly and thus wants to protect their privacy.
The judge acknowledges that the privacy interests that Abavia invokes are serious, but that Abavia can nevertheless be ordered to provide the data if it is sufficiently plausible that the uploaders have violated copyrights of parties for which Brein is defending on a large scale. According to the judge, Abavia has not been able to refute that the uploaders have uploaded copyrighted works on a large scale. On that basis, the judge ruled that Abavia was acting unlawfully by not providing the personal data to XS News.