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German court tells PayPal to reveal pirate’s identity to Sony Music
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 10 April 2017
A German court has told PayPal that it must provide Sony Music with the personal details of one of its customers who used the payment processing firm’s services to collect money via a piracy site.
Credit card companies and money transfer businesses like PayPal have generally been willing to collaborate with the copyright industries on the ‘follow the money’ approach to combating piracy, where rights owners seek to cut off the income streams of people operating copyright infringing websites.
However, they are less keen on providing said rights owners with the contact details of the people operating such sites. That contact information is useful for music or movie companies hoping to pursue legal action against the people running piracy platforms, or which are trying to persuade the authorities to press charges of criminal copyright infringement against the piracy enablers.
According to ADSLZone, the Hamburg District Court recently ruled that PayPal must reveal the identity of the person behind one unnamed piracy site. The German court ruled that the individual was not protected by confidentiality rules in Luxembourg, where PayPal bases its European operations.
The IP lawyer who led the case against PayPal, Clemens Rasch, says the ruling sets an important precedent, in Germany at least, which “makes it easier to identify infringers and make them liable”.