Perhaps Germany has always been an anomaly with the
law. Different mindset, I guess, where people and their
rights count for nothing before the almighty State.

Everywhere else, what I said is quite accurate. The rest of
don't live in a surveillance society where tips are enough to
get things like that to happen, not even if a cop claims to
believe the tipster. In the real world, a police officer has to
swear that he can corroborate his suspicions with probable
cause before any judge will grant a warrant to arrest or
search. That, by definition, means he has seen a crime in
progress or gathered evidence, not that he believed the
word of someone else. If Germany suffers from having a
much lower standard, that's too bad for you, but I suggest
you ask an experienced officer about it before you continue
to paint such a backward picture of law enforcement in your
country. Remember, even in Germany or any other EU
nation, the police and courts know the difference between
reasonable suspicion and probable cause. It's time you
learned it too.

It still doesn't matter if downloading is illegal or not in
Germany. Accessing or possessing such files is illegal
virtually everywhere but those who accidentally downloaded
and deleted such files are still in no greater danger because
of it, since there is still no possibility of prosecution if
they do not share the file and simply delete it, proving their
innocence by action, and having never actually created any
evidence against themselves.

The download mesh is not enough to call probable cause.
That's still just another uncorroborated tip or lead which
they would have to follow up on to get a shared file list.
Since an accidental downloader is not actively sharing the
file, any browse host will not have the suspect file in it and
more importantly will not show the usual suspect pattern of
many more such files, therefore that lead will always be
discarded in favour of real suspects with real collections of
such files.

In addition, even if they had an IP address to look at, any
broad search for such files will never include them as a
source, even if the police managed to connect to them as a
peer. In fact, the lack of response to the files they were
looking for would be proof of innocence as far as an
investigator is concerned, and he or she will move on to the
many suspects for which they actually do have large
quantities of evidence.

Please be more careful what you tell unsuspecting users,
especially since you won't be the one running into problems
from your info, but others might pay for your carelessness.
You are so intent on scaring people unnecessarily over a
theoretical danger which you hold dear but in fact has never
actually occurred, or if it has was so rare and so quickly
dismissed that it may as well have never happened at all.
What you are saying is, in effect, that people's lives can be
totally ruined by random chance simply because they used
Phex, LimeWire or any other P2P to download anything at
all. Do you really want to scare people away from P2P so
much?