This one is good news for porn viewers in Germany.
http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-566.htmlAn ever increasing flood of lawsuits against file sharers that are trading pornographic movies is starting to take its toll on the German justice system, according to a well-respected local law blog. Prosecutors of the German city Essen reportedly were asked to start as many as 10.000 criminal investigations based on the sharing of pornographic material during the last quarter alone. Even a small town like Wuppertal, home to roughly 360.000 people, gets about 2000 of these lawsuits per month.
Most of these criminal investigations go nowhere. But rights holders don't mind: They only care about name and address of the suspected porn fans that get revealed during the initial investigation. Once a company knows who is associated with a certain IP address, it uses this knowledge to send intimidating letters, complete with cost notices, threatening additional civil lawsuits if the alleged downloaders don't pay up.
Prosecutors become increasingly tired of being used as some sort of law and order 411, and they are starting to wonder why they're supposed to pick up the tab for investigations that aren't meant to produce any real results in the first place.
Once again we see a commercial industry forcing the public to pick up the tab for false claims that are made purely to obtain names and addresses, abusing the legal system for gain in this manner should in itself be an offence.