the RIAA has been tormenting music fans since 2000, when it was instrumental in shutting down napster 1.0. now-a-days, the worldwide industry (country-by-country), spends its time trolling the filesharing sites, collecting IP address and dates and times and names of tracks being downloaded. the next step for these companies used to be that they would go through the police who would then obtain your phone records. in germany, the german music federation funds the trolls.
but apparently german courts have determined that the role of the police is to tackle serious crime not to snoop for the music industry. last month, a german court ruled that the police can only get data from telephone companies to uncover serious crimes.
