Court case 6 O 65/24 – Court Ruling (Germany, 2024)

The Maltesian controller operates an online gambling platform. The data subject is a former customer of the controller. By way of an action by stages (Stufenklage), the data subject sued the controller first to provide him with the information under Article 15 GDPR and, on the second stage, to pay an amount that is to be determined after obtaining the claimed information from the controller. He requested the information under Article 15 GDPR to be sent as an Excel file. During the relevant timespan, the controller operated its platform under a Maltesian gambling licence, but did not have a licence in the German State (Land) of Baden-Württemberg. The data subject claims that he was not aware of this legal situation and therefore wants the money back that he paid to the controller. The court held that payment data as well as data concerning the data subject’s usage of the platform were personal data as they were clearly linked to the data subject. Otherwise, the court concluded, the controller, who deems its offering legal, wouldn’t have been able to provide its service to the data subject. Therefore, the data subject was identifiable under Article 4(1) GDPR. Under Article 15(3) GDPR, the information has to be provided in a commonly used electronic form, if the data subject makes his request by electronic means. Neither Article 15 nor Article 12 GDPR specify any certain format; but one can derive from the said norms that the data subject had a right to choose between electronic, written or other form of information. Where the legal literature concludes that data copies only have to be provided in the format they are already in without any editing, the court disagrees with this position. The court rather points to the obligation of providing the information in an electronic form under Article 15(3)(3) GDPR that includes an obligation to convert data to a commonly used electronic format. Even though there is no explicit statement in the GDPR about who can choose the c