Stuttgart Higher Regional Court: image PDF not enough for data portability

The case: 62 pages as an image PDF

Anyone invoking the right to data portability is entitled to receive their data in a format that software can process. Images of paper printouts are not enough. That was the ruling of the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court in its partial judgment of 31 July 2026 (case reference 5 U 271/24). An online betting provider must hand over to a former customer the complete payment and gaming history of all gaming accounts in machine-readable form. For the ordinary right of access the PDF would have sufficed; for data portability it does not.

The claimant had played with a provider based in Malta from August 2022 to January 2023. He mainly placed sports bets and made limited use of virtual slot games. His lawyer then demanded repayment of 15,210.39 euros and requested the deposit and gaming history. The provider sent several PDF files, including an extract from the player account: 62 pages, each with six columns and more than 30 rows. The file consisted of images of the printouts. Not a single word could be selected or copied, the search function found nothing, and the characters were slightly pixelated.

Access under Article 15: a PDF is enough

The player brought his claim in two stages: first for access in a common machine-readable format, then for repayment of the amount resulting from it. The Stuttgart Regional Court dismissed the claim. Access had been granted, and PDF was a common format. Anyone wishing to convert the images into text needed only a piece of software, or could print out the pages and scan them back in as a text document.

On this point the Higher Regional Court agreed with the Regional Court in the result. The right of access under Article 15 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives everyone the right to find out what data a company processes about them. That includes a copy of the data. Payment and gaming histories are such personal data, because they reflect the customer's gaming behaviour and financial circumstances. However, the data subject cannot demand a machine-readable format in this context.

With access requests, the key point is that a person can read the information and reach it easily. A PDF achieves that, and in the court's view even a screenshot would do if need be. The panel therefore considered the 62 pages "just about" sufficient. It left open whether the same applies where a company deliberately converts filterable and sortable data into a form that makes analysis more difficult.

Data portability demands more

The position is different for the right to data portability under Article 20 of the GDPR. It gives data subjects the right to receive the data they have provided to a company in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format. It is intended for switching to another provider. That was precisely the betting provider's argument: the player simply wanted to add up his losses and had no intention of switching providers.

The court did not accept this. Anyone invoking data portability does not have to give reasons. Motives unrelated to data protection must be accepted, including preparing a lawsuit. The right applies to data processed automatically on the basis of consent or a contract and provided by the data subject themselves. Analysed or derived data such as a credit score do not fall within it.

Deposits, withdrawals and stakes do count, though, because the player types the amount into an input field himself. Even the outcome of the bet is included, although it is not supplied by the player. The court counts it among the data that form part of the service itself, like the routes recorded by a fitness tracker, transactions in online banking or order data in online retail.

What machine-readable means

The GDPR does not explain the term. The court fell back on the definition from another EU directive: a format is machine-readable if software can easily identify, recognise and extract specific data, including their internal structure. Text recognition alone is not enough. A table that exists only as an image is structured for a human but not for a machine. Tables are machine-readable as XML or JSON, for example, or as comma-separated values (CSV) with a header row.

The panel examined the technical side in detail. From numerous proceedings it is familiar with the Excel function "Text to Columns", which can be used to transfer tables from a PDF with text recognition into a spreadsheet. That only works if a separator cleanly delimits the fields. Here it failed at the outset because the "Description" column contained many words with spaces. The provider's file thus failed on two counts: no text recognition and no identifiable structure.

Consequences for businesses

The reasoning extends far beyond gambling. The court itself cites fitness data, online banking transactions and order data in online retail as examples of provided data. Anyone running customer accounts with transactions should therefore be aware of two different standards. If a customer requests access, a human-readable copy such as a PDF is enough. If they invoke data portability, the data must be supplied as CSV, JSON, XML or in a spreadsheet file with a header row. In this case the court was satisfied that the player had also based his request for a machine-readable format on data portability.

Images of printouts do not satisfy this claim. Even a PDF with text recognition can fail if the table structure falls apart on import. An export function that outputs transaction and usage data in structured form is therefore a sensible step. Anyone holding the data in a database already has it in that form. And anyone deliberately rendering it unusable should not count on the panel answering the question it left open in their favour.

The dispute is not over yet. The Higher Regional Court will only rule on repayment once the player has quantified his claim. Whether losses from online gambling can be reclaimed depends in part on questions pending before the Federal Court of Justice (BGH). The panel has also allowed an appeal on points of law, because other higher regional courts assess individual legal questions differently. The issues may therefore yet end up before the Federal Court of Justice.