Haven't found an english article about yet, but if you want to try with Babelfish or so:
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0...620524,00.html
Basically Shift.tv was offering a time shifting service for ?4,99 a month and has now been declared illegal due to copyright violations in a final decision by a german court. the court declared, that only the TV stations would be allowed to offer this service, every third party service would violate the copyright holders rights.
and it was not the question if it was a paid service or not