Austrian Supreme Court holds that ISP is not obliged to provide copyright enforcer with file-sharing user’s data.
Posted by Emil A. Georgiev on 17 August, 2009
Austria’s Die Presse reports about a recent decision of the Austrian Supreme Court (4 Ob 41/09x), according to which the file-sharing user’s right of privacy has a higher priority than a copyright enforcer’s right of information.
The Supreme Court had to deal with a case where a collecting society requested an ISP to disclose the personal data of a file-sharing user, whose IP address the collecting society had already obtained.
By so deciding, the Supreme Court overruled the lower instances which found the defendant ISP liable to provide the claimant collecting society with the requested information.
The decision is considered to have a certain signalling effect.
Data retention in Austria becomes even likelier « From Vegas To Legal said
[...] to opine that file sharers’ interest in the protection of their traffic and identity data outweighs the enforcers’ interests to access such [...]