So what this guy is doing here is called “Säbelrasseln” in german.

Please note however that due to the legal situation right now in germany the MAFIAA must file a criminal complained with the authorities first to even get the Names and Addresses of those they want to extort money from. So the more serious problem german copyrightinfringers can face is that the police will confiscate all their technical equippment and a criminal court of law might fine or theoreticly send him to prison for violations of copyright law.

Btw. thanks to the MAFIAA lobby the maximum jail sentence time for some forms of sexual harrasment are lower now then for sharing music.
(do not interpret the last paragraph as an invitation to visit Peter Zombik instead of listening to music) ;-)

In the US, the DMCA law stipulates mandatory damages for copyright infringement, from $750 to $150,000 per infringement depending on circumstances, and through this draconian extortion law, they can force any P2P user to pay them a fortune without having to show that they lost even a single penny.

In any “normal” civil lawsuit, the plaintiff must show an actual, verifiable loss to be awarded dameges by the court.

Since there is no proof that an illegal download equates to a lost sale, the music industry will have a hard time proving their case in any court outside the US that an individual file sharer has personally cost them thousands of dollars in lost profit. Unless Germany has a DMCA-like statutory-damages law, any lawsuit against an ordinary P2P user will likely be an uphill court battle.