[schroeding]

There are lawyers that speciallize in sending fined cease and desist letters, and German courts are very quick in giving court orders to ISPs to force them to give such lawyers the name and address of the offending IP address.

If you torrent in Germany without a VPN or a Seedbox, so from a residential IP, there is an extremely high chance (if you torrent the latest blockbuster from Pirate Bay it will approximate 100%) that you will get a so called "Abmahnung" and have to pay either a few hundred / thousand euros or fight it in an actual court.

PeerGuardian could help, but it's risky and both VPN and Seedboxes are pretty cheap, so I would use one of the latter. :D

[imtringued]

Those lawyers aren't going to bother to go to court for less than 1000€ though. They probably don't even check if their data is correct. They hope you incriminate yourself by paying the fee and signing their prewritten contract which is massively stacked against your favour. You'll have to go to a lawyer just to write an actual cease and desist agreement and most of the time you can dodge the entire bill.

[schroeding]

Sure, but why even bother with this stuff if there are (more or less) safe ways (VPN, Seedbox in another country) available for cheap? :D

[Nextgrid]

I wonder, can this be spoofed to essentially DoS them by making them send their BS letter to every single German resident?

[eurasiantiger]

Just the politicians in power and their entourage, please