The case at hand is a civil case, where the option of a search warrant is not available. If it were a child porn case, the police would still be able to get a warrant to search the house where the IP address is assigned.
I hope is that as time goes on, the legal system (and hopefully all parts of the government) better learn how technologies work and don't work so they can make more informed decisions. Hopefully, as the younger generation start their careers in those fields, they bring better understanding of technologies with them. Though there is another article I read today that is an anecdotal story about someone my age that doesn't know difference between a web browser and search engine.
After writing all this, it reminded me of a friend. He is now an IT manager and his wife is a lawyer (currently a judge's assistant I think). They were talking a couple years ago about the lack of credible expert witnesses in the IT field. She had seen that they are not staying current in the IT field, similarly what can happen with conference speakers. They spend all their time talking about technologies while not having the time to gain a deep knowledge of new technologies.
I seem to taken a tangent towards the end (or maybe the beginning), but oh well.