Amounts paid to rightholders from home copying levies should not be considered as a form of remuneration in exchange for their permission to allow reproductions of their works and/or other protected materials for non-commercial purposes by individuals for their personal use; payment of those amounts should rather be regarded as an indemnification for exploitation losses presumed to occur as a result of such a permission, in cases where the legislator created a legal fiction which presumes that the rightsholders have granted this permission.
Home copying levies are not intended to compensate rightholders for the copying of their works and other protected materials from illegal sources (i.e. from sources which have not obtained the rightsholders permission to make protected materials available). EU Member States cannot permit the collecting of home copying levies to compensate for the reproduction of protected materials which are dowloaded from illegal sources.
Home copying levies can only be collected from individuals who reproduce protected works and other protected materials and can therefore only be levied on devices and information carriers which are made available to users for private use purposes only; i.e., not on computers, smartphones and other devices for professional use!
The above are the opinions expressed by the Advocate-General in his Conclusion in a case referred to the European Court of Justice by the High Court of The Netherlands for a preliminary ruling on 9 January 2014. It remains to be seen whether the European Court will follow the Advocate-General.
An English version of the Conclusion is not yet available. Here you can find the French and Dutch versions.