On Friday, judges at the Regional Court of Cologne (PDF, German) have taken the unusual step of revoking (Google Translate) at least 50 of their own court orders in a strange intellectual property dispute.

Those orders, issued over the course of the last few months, had compelled Deutsche Telekom (a major German ISP) to handover user names and addresses corresponding to over 50,000 German IP addresses that were accused violating the copyright of a handful of porn films. Each order was approved by a three-judge panel, which unanimously had to agree to send the order to Deutsche Telekom.

Those names and addresses were then used to send letters to tens of thousands of Germans, accusing them of copyright infringement of one of four porn films. The letters went on to order them to stop viewing the films on the streaming site Redtube.com (NSFW), and pay €250 ($345) to a shady Swiss company called The Archive. That money, the letter stated, would put a stop to future litigation.

At least two law firms in Cologne and Berlin have taken up the charge of representing people that they feel have been wrongly accused of copyright infringement by a Regensburg-based law firm, Urmann and Colleagues (U+C). Since the summer, U+C has requested 1,000 IP addresses in 50 different applications to the Cologne court. Neither The Archive nor U+C have responded to Ars’ request for comment.

The court appears to have erred in its judgment, believing that these cases involved file-sharing websites—such cases happen very regularly in Germany. But, as these accusations involve streaming, rather than direct infringement or downloading, the judges now say (PDF, German) that individuals cannot be held liable for what appeared on a streaming site, rather than a download or file-sharing site.

“This is, in my point of view, a groundbreaking decision,” said Christian Solmecke told Ars. He’s a Cologne-based lawyer whose firm is representing 600 Germans (Google Translate) that have received such letters.

“This is a really unusual decision,” he added. “But as I’ve said, the court did not read the documents correctly in the first instance and they thought that these are the same documents like file-sharing documents. There are 600 decisions in Cologne per month for file-sharing normally.”

Cologne is often the jurisdiction for such cases as Deutsche Telekom sits in this particular jurisdiction.

“The affected users can immediately appeal these decisions—the lower court then has the opportunity to review their decision,” Dominik Boecker, a German IT lawyer not involved in this case, told Ars.

The Archive has apparently had “procedural representational rights” to the “Amanda’s Secrets” film, and a few other films, from a company called Matrazensport, since July 2013. According to The Archive’s German-language business filing with Swiss authorities, its primary business is the “acquisition and evaluation of audio media and audio-visual media of any kind.”

Solmecke added that he believes that this is the beginning of the end for this entire saga, but added that Cologne judges are set to make further rulings in January 2014.

“Where the money is in 18 months, I don’t know. It could be gone.”

Heise.de, a German tech news site, reported (Google Translate) earlier this month that some who have received these warning letters have checked their browser histories and found a series of domain forwards

http://hit.trafficholder.com/transfer.php?http://49655.movfile.net

http://49655.movfile.net/

http://49655.retdube.net/

Which then finally resolves to Redtube.com.

Trafficholder.com provides “internet marketing services for adult webmasters,” typically showing pop-ups for other sites, and even offers geo-localized service.

As Heise concluded: "So it is possible, for example, for under $30 to buy 10,000 German IP addresses diverted from porn sites to hit a given destination URL. In this case the URL was obviously 49655.movfile.net, supplied by specifically German traffic."

Despite the fact that TrafficHolder says on its website that it has “round the clock” customer service Monday through Friday, no one picked up the listed Los Angeles phone number when Ars called Friday afternoon. TrafficHolder also did not immediately respond to e-mail.

If this is indeed the case, and someone falsely induced Germans to click on and watch this movie, then Solmecke told Ars, this could be a crime, and his clients could potentially sue whoever is responsible to get their lawyer’s fees reimbursed. However, because The Archive is in Switzerland—outside of Germany, and the European Union—this could take time, he said.

“If I sue [The Archive] now, to get the money, it would take a year until I can start the enforcement process, and that takes another half year,” he said. “Where the money is in 18 months, I don’t know. It could be gone.”

And which sites generated these TrafficHolder pop-ups? That too is a mystery.

“This is the biggest question: I need more information about it,” Solmecke added. “But what I need are screenshots, perhaps of the browser history. I need at least three or four screenshots to prove that this is true and to give them to the prosecutor. This is very very relevant if they never clicked on Redtube and were pushed onto Redtube.”