The plaintiff's application for a preliminary injunction was successful on two claims. The court found that the defendant's actions infringed the plaintiff's copyright as a database producer. The defendant was therefore ordered to cease and desist both from further scraping data of the plaintiff's website as well as the use of the scraped data. The claim for deletion of the infringement data was rejected due to the fact that the case concerned a preliminary injunction.
The court did not consider the TDM exception to be applicable in favour of the defendant here, as the plaintiff declared a legally effective out-opt against automated data processing. The opt-out clause was part of the plaintiff’s general data and privacy policy, which was accessible through a link at the bottom of the plaintiff’s front page. The text of this policy explicitly prohibited automated data collection such as data crawling, data scraping, or text and data mining. This policy was embedded in the website’s HTML code, meaning it was technically accessible and readable both by human users and automated systems. Because of this, the court found that the opt-out met the DSM Directive’s requirement of being “machine-readable”.