But that taste of victory may be short-lived. In making the ruling, the European Court Of Justice said all the EU need to is to tweak the rules to make such customer disclosures mandatory.

The court decision was about a case where Spanish telecom company Telefonica refused to hand over information regarding which of its customers shared content owned by members of Spanish trade group for film and music producers, Promusicae.

What caused the court to side with Telefonica is that Spanish law treats copyright infringement cases as civil matters instead of criminal cases. What’s more, EU law doesn’t require governments to enforce copyright law by forcing companies to disclose personal data in civil cases.

Although the European Union is supposed to be, well, a union, when it comes to copyright issues individual countries have been making decisions that are sometimes at odds with their EU brethren.

For example, a Belgian court said a local ISP should install blocking software, while a German court last summer refused to order ISPs to hand over customer data to record companies.

And then there’s France, which plans on disconnecting users caught distributing infringing material. So, there’s still a few issues to resolve before the EU can truly be an EU when it comes to copyright.