Representatives of the German music industry asked for new powers in order to obtain, without court order, personal information about alleged file-sharers from Internet Service Providers.

In a recent event held in Munich by the Institute of Copyright and Media Law, representatives of the rights holder associations claimed that this change would improve the fight against piracy, through easier civil-law suits against the alleged copyright infringers. This new obligation should be imposed through the new changes in the copyright law for the implementation of the IPR enforcement directive.

Director of the German Chapter of IFPI, Peter Zombik, explained, "The EU Directive does not require a court order for the disclosure of such information." He also called for an earlier implementation of the data retention Directive, hoping that the retained data could be used in the civil-law copyright cases. IFPI Germany is blaming the file-sharers for a seventh consecutive annual decrease in turnover in CD sales.

On the other hand, Hannes Federrath, Professor of Information Security Management at the University of Regensburg reminded that "What you are demanding here goes beyond what prosecutors of consumers of child pornography get."

These actions of the rights holder associations are also confirming the worries of the privacy experts that the data retained in Europe on the basis of the new Data retention Directive will be used with a much broader scope than initially suggested – fighting terrorism.

Holders of copyrights want to have providers hand over information without court orders (10.04.2006)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/71866

EDRI-gram: Data Retention Directive: reactions related to the costs involved (18.01.2006)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.1/dataretentioncosts

German Music Biz Hit by Pirates For Seventh Straight Year (22.03.2006)
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1941076,00.html