PayPal must hand over the personal details of a pirate site operator to Sony Music, a German court has ruled. The Hamburg-based law firm Rasch sees the decision as a major victory, one that makes it easier for rightsholders to expose pirates and hold them accountable through their payment providers. For several years PayPal has been trying to limit how much business it does with sites and services linked to copyright infringement. The Hamburg District Court ruled that PayPal must hand over the information they have on the operator of an unnamed pirate site. In this case, Luxemburg’s banking secrecy provisions do not shield the website operator.
In recent years copyright holders have started to rely more heavily on this “follow-the-money” approach. One of the goals is to dry up the resources of alleged copyright infringers. With the German ruling, they now have an ulterior motive to go after sites’ payment providers, at least in Germany.

Source: IPR in China