154In order to strike a balance between the rights and interests at issue as required by the case-law cited in paragraph 130 of the present judgment, account must be taken of the fact that, where an offence is committed online, the IP address might be the only means of investigation enabling the person to whom that address was assigned at the time of the commission of the offence to be identified. To that consideration must be added the fact that the retention of IP addresses by providers of electronic communications services beyond the period for which that data is assigned does not, in principle, appear to be necessary for the purpose of billing the services at issue, with the result that the detection of offences committed online may therefore prove impossible without recourse to a legislative measure under Article 15(1) of Directive 2002/58, something which several governments mentioned in their observations to the Court. As those governments argued, that may occur, inter alia, in cases involving particularly serious child pornography offences, such as the acquisition, dissemination, transmission or making available online of child pornography, within the meaning of Article 2(c) of Directive 2011/93/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 2011 on combating the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children and child pornography, and replacing Council Framework Decision 2004/68/JHA (OJ 2011 L 335, p. 1).
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