Dutch Court Dismisses Complaint Against Pirate Bay Uploader

A Dutch court has ruled that copyright infringement cases are a civil matter that don’t belong in criminal courts.

The first-ever criminal case involving copyright infringement in The Netherlands has come to an abrupt end. The defendant, “Stefan K,” admitted to uploading 5000 books to The Pirate Bay, but his lawyer argued that file-sharing claims are not criminal matters and should be pursued in civil court. “This rule [of Dutch law] prescribes that in principle intellectual property infringement should be handled under civil law,” the attorney said. “Only in exceptional cases is the public prosecutor allowed to prosecute.”

Those exceptions are for cases in which the defendant is part of a criminal organization or infringes upon copyright as part of a business. The prosecutor in the case said the policy guidelines relegating copyright infringement to civil court didn’t apply in this instance because of the sheer volume of content involved, but the court disagreed and dismissed the case outright.

Neither the publishers of the books nor BREIN, the anti-piracy group who reported the user to the authorities in the first place, have commented on the dismissal. The prosecutor could appeal the case but given the relative reluctance that courts in The Netherlands have shown in pursuing criminal copyright infringement cases, that may be unlikely.

Both the U.S. and the U.K. have shown a far greater willingness to jail people for copyright-related matters; the former operator of surthechannel.com was sentenced to four years in prison last summer and more recently, a U.S. court delivered a 40-month sentence and a fine of over $400,000 to a man who pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal copyright infringement.

Source: TorrentFreak