Anti-piracy organisations in Germany who target illegal downloading are likely to run into problems following a decision made by the highest appeal court in German. According to this report, T-Online has been ordered by the court to delete all IP logs to guarantee privacy for its customers upon request by any of its customers. This means that if a customer complains, the ISP has no choice but to comply with the order by deleting all their IP logs. Apparently, this court ruling comes as a result of a man from Münster being sued for making a sarcastic comment in an online forum back in 2002.
Unfortunately this is potentially bad news for the anti-piracy organisations, as these collect IP addresses they discover to be involved in copyright infringement as well as the time of occurrence and thus rely on ISPs have a list of what IPs were assigned to which customers. As a result, only those using static (fixed) IP addresses would still be traceable without logs.
Further info can be read at the German language source.
