NEW YORK, April 26 (Reuters) - The New York state court system will stop selling data with the names of individuals in tenant-landlord disputes, a practice advocates say created tenant blacklists.

Beginning June 1, the court system will no longer provide commercial data vendors with the names of people involved in Housing Court matters, Gail Prudenti, the state's chief administrative judge, wrote in a letter made public Thursday.

The change should "help better protect the personal information of the litigants in our Housing Court," Prudenti said in the April 10 letter to state Senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat who represents Manhattan.

In a news release on Thursday, Krueger's office called the change a "key step" toward ending blacklisting and a "victory for tenants."

The unrestricted sale of the data to tenant screening companies has led to the creation of databases used by landlords and real estate management agents to discriminate against potential tenants, Krueger's office said.

Information regarding individual cases will continue to be available through the court website and in Housing Court clerks' offices, according to Krueger's release.

Attorney Stephen Dobkin, who brought a case last year on behalf of a tenant seeking to bar sale of the data, said he was skeptical of the impact of leaving out names if the court continues to provide computer feeds for use by tenant-screening companies.

"If it's just a matter of retracting the names, I don't think it will have a significant impact on the blacklist," he said.

Tenant screening companies already have names of tenants in ongoing proceedings and can update their records with new names from the clerk's office, he said.

Dobkin represented tenant James Whelan, who argued in a suit filed in October that sale of the data effectively locked tenants out of the residential housing market if they had appeared in court records.

The court system countered that it is an efficient way of meeting its constitutional obligation to make court records publicly available.

The data indicates whether a tenant has appeared in court but does not specify why, or whether the tenant is a plaintiff or a defendant, according to the lawsuit.

Whelan, who was living in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper East Side, was told his lease would be terminated after his building was sold. The lawsuit claimed Whelan feared being blacklisted if he challenged the landlord's decision in court.

The case was dropped after Whelan learned his lease was being renewed, Dobkin said.

About 30 state court systems around the country sell access to court records to outside companies, said Bill Raftery, an analyst with the National Center for State Courts. He did not know if any of them restricted individual names in landlord-tenant disputes.

(Reporting by Karen Freifeld)

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