More big lawsuits in the news, the European equivalent of the RIAA, the "International Federation of the Phonographic Industry", has filed 2000 lawsuits in 10 European countries, including Germany and Italy. The charges, of course, all relate to file sharing and people making files available illegally. Citing large drops in CD sales in recent years as one of the motivating factors, if European people act anything like people in the U.S. did, the majority will settle and let the IFPI have their way.
Although it doesn't seem to be occurring to any of these large companies that CD sales could be dropping for reasons far beyond pirating, including the medium itself slowly going extinct, it's likely that on both sides of the ocean this will continue for a long time to come. File sharers beware!