Yep, they are serious business, not one of the dodgy ones that send out as many threatening letters as possible and hope that a few pay. They'll actually go to court, or did so in the past, with a huge army of lawyers. When the "fliegende gerichtsstand" was abolished they got more selective with which cases they actually took to court, depending on the city they'd have to go to. Before, all cases were handled in Munich, and the judges there were pretty much rubber-stamping the cases in favor of WF.

> if you run a mirror which is accessible from Germany

Access from Germany isn't the issue, having a German IP is the issue. They don't go after foreign seeders because that would be too much hassle getting the real data behind the IP (just like German law doesn't apply to them), but they hunt down seeders with German IP's with quite a vengeance.

PG is a US organization. They may have volunteer mirrors in Germany, but all of PG itself is in San Francisco, right?

Now we're mixing up 2 issues... torrents of copyrighted content with German seeders, and e-books of copyrighted content (at least copyrighted in Germany) with a website provider.

They only go for German seeders because asking a foreign ISP for the address of someone who used a particular IP address at a particular date and time would probably get them the middle finger as a reply. In the case of PG, they know who is making the copyrighted content available in Germany, because PG has an address on their website.

And a German court said it's within their jurisdiction.

If you run a mirror with your contact information available, presumably they will contact you next.

> Waldorf Frommer

Oh they are still around?! Someone should shut them down and jail for the mere reason of the enourmous amount of paper they waste on trolling letters.

I've seen them squeeze 1000 Euro out of so many people (usually the sum they go for, making it a tad more expensive than a defence lawyer would cost you). It's a sad state of affairs.