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
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.
I'm from Germany and I had an issue with this two times. The first time was when I torrented a Movie when I was like 17, and got a C&D which ordered me to pay a €1000 fine. Got a lawyer (which cost around €500) and never heard back. Two years later they sent a letter again, because of the same thing and demanded €2000, to which I just didn't respond.
The time window from me torrenting to the letter being sent was around 2 months, not that bad.
Nowadays, I just use a VPN & Torrent Caching, no issue at all (40 TB and counting) :)
