IANAL, but here's my assessment on this: First and foremost, as far as I know, a registrar disclosing customer data without a warrant would violate the law in

IANAL, but here's my assessment on this: First and foremost, as far as I know, a registrar disclosing customer data without a warrant would violate the law in Germany as well. For `.de`-Domains the holder information used to be publicly available, at the dismay of privacy activists; in the same way the ICANN wanted the same. Then GDPR came and pretty much put a legally binding end to this. And it comes down to this: Under GDPR such customer information enjoys strong protection. A lawyer has no more rights to that information than any other party who's not tasked with enforcing the law. The intention of this letter is to gain information about the EasyDNS customer, so that this customer can be sent a cease and desist, which due to some lack in German C&D law can carry a hefty fee. Inside Germany a whole range of law firms specialized on actively searching for unlawful behavior and sending out C&D en masse. A common practice among these firms is to scrape BitTorrent trackers for peer IPs + timestamps (or to actually manufacture them), bundling them all up in a criminal complaint so that ISPs must deliver to the state attorney the names of the customers these IP addresses were assigned to at the given time. However instead of pressing charges they will then drop the case, and instead send C&D letters to those people. The lawyers who operate that way have become known as "Abmahnanwalt" The lawyer who send this letter is Robert Fechner. And lo and behold: Robert Fechner is known to be such an Abmahnanwalt: https://www.google.com/search?q=abmahnanwalt+fechner https://www.google.com/search?q=abmahnanwalt+fechner