On the interpretation of a judgment obliging the operator of a social network to grant the heirs of the beneficiaries of a user account access to the full account
The III Civil Senate of the Federal Court of Justice has ruled that the operator of a social network who has been ordered to grant the heirs of a network participant access to the latter's complete user account must grant the heirs the possibility to take note of the account and its contents in the same way and to be able to "move around" in it - with the exception of active use - in the same way as the original account holder previously did.
Facts
The debtor operates a social network. It was ordered by a final judgment of the Berlin Regional Court of 17 December 2015 - confirmed by the Federal Court of Justice (judgment of 12 July 2018 - III ZR 183/17 - press release 115/18) - to grant the parents of a deceased participant in the network, as heirs, access to the complete user account and the communication content of their daughter contained therein. The debtor then sent the creditor, the mother of the deceased, a USB stick containing a PDF file with more than 14,000 pages which, according to the debtor, contained a copy of the data read from the account held by the deceased. It is disputed between the parties whether the debtor's obligation from the judgment of the Regional Court of 17 December 2015 has been fulfilled by this.
Process flow
At the creditor's request, the Regional Court imposed a penalty payment of €10,000 on the debtor for failing to comply with its obligation under the judgment of 17 December 2015. The Appellate Court set aside the order of the Regional Court on the debtor's immediate appeal and dismissed the creditor's application to impose a penalty payment on the debtor. This is the subject of the creditor's appeal on a point of law, which was allowed by the Court of Appeal.
Decision of the Federal Supreme Court
The Third Civil Senate of the Federal Court of Justice overturned the decision of the Court of Appeal and restored the decision of the first instance.
The interpretation of the operative part of the judgment of the Regional Court of Berlin of 17 December 2015 already shows that the creditor must not only be granted access to the communication content in the user account, but must also be granted the possibility to take note of the user account itself and its content in the same way as the original account holder was able to.
This also follows from the reasons for the above-mentioned judgment and the judgment of the Federal Supreme Court of 12 July 2018. Both decisions derived the creditor's claim to be fulfilled by the debtor from inheritance law. The Federal Supreme Court stated that the contract of use between the creditor's daughter and the debtor had passed to the heirs with its rights and obligations by way of universal succession. The latter had thereby entered into the contractual relationship and therefore, as contractual partners and new account holders, had a primary claim to access to their daughter's user account and the digital contents contained therein. From this position of the heirs and the deceased's primary claim to performance from the contractual relationship existing with the debtor, which had passed to them, it follows without further ado that the heirs must be granted access to the user account in the same way as their daughter had previously been granted access. This also follows from numerous further statements by the Federal Court of Justice and the Berlin Regional Court in their aforementioned judgments.
The debtor has not fulfilled her obligation under the judgment of the Berlin Regional Court of 17 December 2015. By providing the USB stick with an extensive PDF file, complete access to the user account was not granted. The PDF file does not fully represent the user account. The latter requires not only the representation of the contents of the account, but also the opening of all its functionalities - with the exception of those concerning its active continued use - and the German language in which the user account was contractually managed during the lifetime of the deceased. The file submitted by the creditor does not fulfil these requirements.
Order of the Federal Supreme Court of 27 august 2020 - III ZB 30/20
Lower courts:
LG Berlin - Order of 13 February 2019 - 20 O 172/15
Kammergericht - Order of 3 December 2019 - 21 W 11/19
