Another story about the trolls: they have now issued bills to German users who visited a porn website and streamed adult content. Like in most cases, a Swiss-based company which owns the material hosted by porn website Redtube believes that Germans will be too shocked if it becomes known that they visited a porn portal and agree to pay up before the case gets to court.



The unnamed Swiss company is known to be demanding about $350 for each video watched, so the Germans could be in for a stiff bill. The company hired a law firm U+C and claims to have received a go ahead from a local court, plus 10,000 warnings may have been sent to users for porn content streamed in August.

However, German press believes that the court in Cologne may have issued a wrong verdict, and shouldn’t have allowed attorneys of the company to go forward and ask Internet service providers to reveal names and addresses associated with the IPs that allegedly streamed adult content.

Under German law, streaming doesn’t equal to file-sharing. Users streaming video are just watching content located on another website, whether it is legal or not. As such, they are unaware whether the video they streamed were obtained legally by Redtube, because the website doesn’t provide such information to its visitors.

Apparently, any court will chunk the case, but there actually won’t be many Germans willing to go to court and boast they saw donkey porn legally. In the meantime, it is unknown how users’ IPs were shared with the law firm sending out the warnings, but it is clear that their privacy has been violated somehow.

German press suggested that the users might have been targeted with malware which collected their IP addresses to use them in similar legal proceedings. In this case, the Swiss company might end up with finding itself on the receiving end of criminal charges.