A Dutch court has declared a criminal case against a Pirate Bay uploader inadmissible. The man admitted uploading more than 5,000 e-books to the popular BitTorrent site, but the court ruled that copyright infringement cases belong in a civil, not criminal court. Current policy rules prescribe that copyright infringements should only be handled in a criminal court if the defendant is part of a criminal organization, or when the infringements are carried out as business activities.

A Dutch Pirate Bay user who was reported to the authorities by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has seen his case dropped.

In the first criminal case against a BitTorrent uploader in the Netherlands, Stefan K was accused of uploading 5,000 e-books.

While the man admitted doing so, his attorney argued that the public prosecutor had no right to go after his client because file-sharing lawsuits belong in civil court.

In other words, the copyright holders should file a lawsuit themselves, and not leave this up to the authorities. The lawyer’s argument is based on a policy rule where it’s stated that in general Internet piracy should not fall under criminal law.

“This rule prescribes that in principle intellectual property infringement should be handled under civil law. Only in exceptional cases is the public prosecutor allowed to prosecute,” the uploader’s attorney told Tweakers in a comment.

For online piracy these exceptions are when the defendant is part of a criminal organization, or when the infringements are carried out as business activities.

The Rotterdam court agreed with the assessment of the defense lawyer and threw out the case. This means that the Pirate Bay uploader walks free, although the copyright holders are still allowed to start a case of their own.

Prosecutor Esther Loppé disagrees with the court and believes that they should have been allowed to proceed with the case.

“Of course there are people who upload a small number of files. However, in this case there were a lot of files, meaning that the policy doesn’t apply so strictly,” she says.

The prosecutor is right that Internet piracy on a mass scale can indeed be handled as a criminal case. However, the policy rule clearly states that the civil route is preferred, even in the case of commercial and pre-release piracy.

It is unknown whether the public prosecutor will appeal the decision. Neither the book publishers nor anti-piracy group BREIN has thus far commented on the verdict.

This is not the first setback for the Dutch Department of Justice in an online piracy case.

In 2010 the criminal proceeding against P2P index site ShareConnector was also dismissed. In this case the court ruled that the public prosecutor relied too much on evidence provided by BREIN, and failed to do a proper investigation of its own.