The response of the record distributors to digital music has been punative and stupid, and they’ve just been slapped down by a Court in Germany.

They refused to force an ISP to turn over data of file sharers.

Under the European privacy regulations, this is typically restricted to criminal, not civil, matters:

The ruling follows the publication two weeks ago of an Advocate-General’s opinion prepared for the European Court of Justice (ECJ) which said that countries whose law restricted the handing over of identifying data to criminal cases only were compliant with EU Directives.

Advocate-General Juliane Kokott produced advice for the ECJ on a Spanish case in which a copyright holders’ group wanted ISP Telefonica to hand over subscriber details to it.

Kokott said that details did not have to be handed over in civil cases such as Telefonica’s, and that they only had to be handed over in criminal cases. The ECJ does not have to follow an Advocate-General’s advice, but does so in over three-quarters of cases.

Another German authority had made a similar decision earlier this year, according to Heise Online. The chief prosecutor’s office in Celle refused to offer a handover because it said that substantial damage had not been shown, and that it doubted that music industry representatives would use the evidence to bring a criminal case.

It would be nice if the US weren’t the 3rd world of privacy rights.