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I don't suppose you have specific references to the law itself do you?
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It's part of the tax law which is huge.
A few years ago I tried to get a copy of the US budget to try and find the dollar value sent to the recording industry but it was difficult to get and some exerpts I found show the dollars encoded with the name/number of the tax law, senate bill number, etc. You have to have a massive listing of laws to cross reference and find the rules behind the budget item. More work than I wanted to do on a casual weekend.
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About 2 months ago, I get a letter from charter, accusing me of downloading several episodes of Boardwalk Empire..
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I can explain this:
When you boot your cable modem - you are dynamically assigned an IP address. All your internet traffic is tagged with this number. All the records per day are tagged with this address. If the guy who did download Boardwalk Empire cycled power on his modem, then you cycled power on yours - you now have his old IP number. When they searched - they found HIS activity weeks earlier but that you now have this number.
The computer-savvy pirates cycle their power every few days to help obfuscate the tracking of their activity. The smarter pirates use VPN services which encrypt their packets and their ISP only sees activity between their PC and the VPN service so they cannot see what sites you are accessing because the VPN server is really hitting the sites.
The assigning of IP addresses is automatic but logging the re-assigning of IP addresses go into files that only network engineers see and typically toss out after a few days/weeks. It's not part of the normal billing system that ISPs track. They usually can only see who has each IP address at this moment - not what you had a few days or weeks ago.