On Monday, a New York criminal court judge denied Twitter’s motion (PDF) to stop a court order that requires the company to produce information about one of its users, an Occupy Wall Street protestor. The move appears to open the door to Twitter’s release of the data in question, lest the company face being in contempt of court.

Malcolm Harris, aka @destructuremal, was charged with Disorderly Conduct in a state criminal case filed by the state of New York late last year. In January, state prosecutors subpoenaed Twitter “seeking the defendant’s account information and tweets for their relevance in the ongoing criminal investigation” for the period of September 15, 2011 to December 31, 2011.

Specifically, the prosecutor appears to be interested in more than the contents of the tweets themselves. The subpoena would include the IP address he logged in from, direct messages, deleted messages, how long each login lasted, dates, time, and possible location information.

Twitter said previously it would not comply until the court had ruled on its motion.

Previously, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Citizen together filed an amicus brief. The group argued in favor of the defendant and claimed the subpoena was “unconstitutional because it is overbroad and impermissibly sweeps in a vast swath of information about Harris’s expressive activities that the [District Attorney] has no legitimate need to know.”

"We are pleased that the court has ruled for a second time that the tweets at issue must be turned over," Chief Assistant District Attorney Daniel R. Alonso said in a statement provided to CNET. "We look forward to Twitter's complying and to moving forward with the trial."

However, Twitter has said previously that its terms of service make it clear that users own their content, and therefore the company does not have to comply with such requests unless ordered to by a court.

Not surprisingly, in a statement, Aden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU, also called the ruling “disappointing.”

“What is surprising is that the court continued to fail to grapple with one of the key issues underlying this case: do individuals give up their ability to go to court to try to protect their free speech and privacy rights when they use the Internet?” he wrote.

“As we explained in our brief, the answer has to be no. The United States Supreme Court and courts around the country have repeatedly made clear that individuals whose constitutional rights are implicated by government requests for information to third parties have standing to challenge those third-party requests. There’s no reason for the result to be different when Internet activities are at issue, regardless of whether individuals ‘own’ their Internet speech or whether the Internet companies ‘own’ it.”