Is this true... millions? With only 80 million people in Germany, it seems like if copyright trolls were shaking down millions of people, it would more or less involve every single organization and household in the entire country.
It's also worth noting that these letters cost about 1000 Euros each, there is almost nothing you can do about them, and they require not the slightest bit of evidence that you actually did anything wrong.
"In cases involving peer-to-peer sharing of music files, the value of the claim was regularly set at €10,000 per file by the rights-holders...Recipients of Abmahnungen often pay the costs without consulting a lawyer, or negotiate a settlement themselves. There is a noticeable tendency to pay rather than challenge the claim..."
and
"the evidence collected about the infringement will only identify the IP...This IP address needs to be matched against the subscriber to whom it was allocated at the time of the infringement...by way of a judicial disclosure order...[in which] German courts are rather reluctant to engage in an assessment...[for instance] within 9 months in 2009, 2824 disclosure orders were sought in Cologne alone, each relating to several hundreds of IP addresses."
[1]-The RedTube copyright infringement affair in Germany: shame on who? (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13600869.2015.10...)
Edit: After looking up some more data, at the peak in 2010 there were estimated around 500k of those letters and the million bar was likely crossed.
So take this with a grain of salt as both would likely overestimate.
It's bad but on the other hand I also do understand copyright holders who see their product being used for free without receiving payment in return.
It's a grey area in most countries because so many people (me including) do this that laws become basically unenforceable. It's not surprising that Germany is one of those countries where this can be enforced.
One thing that these lawyers like to do is to target people downloading porn, because very few of them are going to fight back on that risking that it gets publicly known what kind of porn they are into.
With these logs they approach the ISP's to give them names and addresses which the ISP's are forced to do.
So it's easy to see how they automated the whole process, which is a precondition if you want to go after hundreds of thousands of file sharers.
I am not sure what happens with universities and large organizations.
I've seen an article here linked yesterday where the EU will make it mandatory for WiFi networks to use password authentication. So when you say how about people that have dynamic IP's or how about people that only access public WiFi networks the government will always find a solution by passing a law that restricts access to those who have authenticated (and therefore made themselves trackable in some way)
These restrictions are never implemented for your own safety but instead they claim it is for the safety of the businesses providing these services. How is it for the safety of these businesses? It's because the government implements a framework which makes ISP's and public WiFi network providers liable for damages caused by their users.
So the government has a problem in its never ending quest for more power caused by people doing stuff they don't want them to do (and frankly, in the case of the Internet it is by nature very often exchange of some kind of information or knowledge) so they create liability issues for businesses that enable their users to do these things.
After that file hosters (e.g. Rapidshare) became popular, where only one person is uploading and the downloaders are hard to identify and even harder to sue.