The systematic recording of users’ IP addresses and the communication of their names and postal addresses to the owner of intellectual property rights in order to enable a claim for compensation to be made are admissible under certain conditions. This is what the Court of Justice of the EU ruled on Thursday 17 June in case C-597/19.
This case concerns a request for information from the company Mircom International Content Management & Consulting Limited to the internet service provider Telenet BVBA asking it to produce the identification data of its customers on the basis of IP addresses collected by a specialised company on behalf of Mircom. Telenet customers used their Internet connections to share films from the Mircom catalogue on a peer-to-peer network. But Telenet opposes this request.
The Belgian court hearing the case is asking the Court, among other things, whether an intellectual property rights holder who does not use his rights, but claims damages from alleged infringers, can benefit from the measures provided for in EU law to ensure the enforcement of those rights, for example by requesting information.
In its judgment, the Court concludes that an IPR owner, such as Mircom, can indeed benefit from the IPR protection system, but its request for information must be “justified, proportionate and not abusive”.
It specifies that the finding of such abuse is a matter for the court which referred the case, which could, for example, verify whether legal proceedings were actually brought in the event of a refusal to reach an amicable solution.
The Court also held that EU law does not, in principle, preclude the systematic registration, by the holder of intellectual property rights or by a third party on his behalf, of the IP addresses of users of peer-to-peer networks whose Internet connections have allegedly been used in infringing activities, or the communication of the names and postal addresses of the users to that holder for the purposes of a claim for compensation.
However, again, requests must be justified, proportionate, not abusive and provided for by a national legislative measure, it says.
The Court states that EU law does not establish an obligation for a company such as Telenet to communicate personal data to private persons in order to be able to prosecute copyright infringements. However, EU law allows Member States to impose such an obligation, it concludes.
See the judgment: https://bit.ly/35sco3Y (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)