Nonetheless, to find a fair balance of interests, the AG proposes to enter into the merits of the private copying levy to ascertain whether, in the light of the overall analysis of the technical chain involving the Cloud service provider, a single process can be identified and so doubling or even tripling the obligation to pay the fair compensation has to be avoided.

n the Padawan case (C-467/08) the Court observed that copying ‘by natural persons acting in a private capacity must be regarded as an act likely to cause harm to the author of the work concerned’,  but it also drew attention to the considerable practical difficulties in identifying the infringements of private users, together with the fact that the harm caused by such individual infringements might simply be de minimis and thus not give rise to a payment obligation. The Court then stated that it is open to the Member States to establish a ‘private copying levy’ for the purposes of financing fair compensation chargeable not to the private persons concerned, but to those who have the digital reproduction equipment, devices and media and who, on that basis, in law or in fact, make that equipment available to private users or who provide copying services for them.