In a significant legal development for digital intermediaries operating in France, the Paris Judicial Court has dealt a substantial blow to sports broadcaster beIN Sports. The court has rejected the network’s bid to impose hefty daily financial penalties on major virtual private network (VPN) providers and cloud infrastructure giant Cloudflare for failing to completely block unauthorized pirate websites and IPTV streams broadcasting Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) matches.
The ruling marks the latest chapter in an escalating legal battle over online sports piracy in France, where rightsholders have increasingly turned to broad site-blocking injunctions targeting internet service providers, DNS resolvers, and privacy-focused tech intermediaries. While the underlying blocking orders remain valid for the duration of the WTA season, the court’s refusal to penalize companies for imperfect compliance reinforces the legal standard that intermediaries are only required to make reasonable efforts, rather than guarantee absolute results.
The Origin of the Conflict
The dispute traces back to May, when the Paris Judicial Court ordered several prominent VPN providers and technical intermediaries to block approximately ten pirate websites and IPTV services. These illicit platforms had been streaming exclusive WTA tennis matches without authorization, undercutting the commercial value of the broadcasting rights held by beIN Sports, which maintains exclusive French distribution rights for the vast majority of the WTA tour.
The legal mechanism followed a familiar and well-trodden pattern in France. Requesting these broad injunctions has become a standard playbook for major sports broadcasters and media companies seeking to stanch unauthorized streams in real time. Shortly after securing the initial order against the VPNs, beIN Sports successfully obtained a parallel blocking order directed at Cloudflare, the major content delivery network and web infrastructure provider.
During the initial proceedings, beIN Sports had asked the court to establish steep penalties—specifically €2,000 per day for each domain that two of the targeted VPN providers failed to block. At that time, the court declined to impose the fines, noting that there was no evidence demonstrating that the companies willfully intended to defy the judicial order. Furthermore, the court indicated that if technical complications or enforcement gaps arose during implementation, the aggrieved parties retained the right to return to court for further evaluation. That is precisely the path beIN Sports chose to follow.
beIN Loses Penalty Request
Frustrated by the continued accessibility of some of the targeted domains, beIN Sports returned to the Paris Judicial Court, arguing that the intermediaries had failed to properly execute the blocking mandates. According to initial reports from the French tech publication L’Informé, the broadcaster aggressively escalated its demands, requesting a dramatic increase to a daily penalty of €10,000 for every single domain that remained accessible through the defendants’ networks.
The targeted entities—Cloudflare, Surfshark, and NordVPN—pooled their defense strategy and were represented by the same legal counsel. During the hearings, their lawyers pointed to unavoidable technical constraints inherent to their network architectures, assuring the court that the companies had acted in good faith and done everything within their technical power to comply with the judicial directive. A fourth provider, Proton, was also named in the legal action but ultimately did not make an appearance at the hearing.
An examination of how the blocking orders played out in practice revealed that the technical enforcement was far from infallible. Cloudflare successfully blocked three of the four specified pirate sites, though it did so strictly through its content delivery network (CDN) layer rather than broader network interventions. Meanwhile, Surfshark and NordVPN managed to block six out of eleven domains, but restricted their actions exclusively to the domain name system (DNS) services operating on their servers physically located within France.
‘Reasonable Effort’ Standard Upheld
For the Paris Judicial Court, the imperfect enforcement measures implemented by the tech companies were deemed sufficient to satisfy the legal requirements of the injunction. In a pair of rulings issued on October 7, the court concluded that internet intermediaries are legally obligated to make a "reasonable effort" to block infringing sites, but they are explicitly not required to guarantee a flawless outcome. This interpretation aligns squarely with established case law from the Court of Justice of the European Union, which has historically sought to balance copyright enforcement with fundamental economic freedoms.
The case files presented during the proceedings demonstrated that all of the responding companies had indeed carried out the court-ordered blocks, at least partially and to the best of their technological capabilities.
"The requested penalty (…) therefore does not appear necessary or proportionate, given the need to strike a fair balance between the protection of the intellectual property rights of copyright and neighboring rights holders, and the freedom to conduct a business enjoyed by economic operators," the court wrote in its decision, as translated and reported by L’Informé.
Despite the failed attempt to secure financial penalties, the original site-blocking orders themselves remain fully active and in effect until the conclusion of the WTA season, which is scheduled to wrap up on November 14. In the meantime, beIN Sports retains the legal right to appeal the court’s rejection of its penalty requests.
This outcome closely mirrors a similar decision handed down by the same Paris court just a month prior in a case involving French pay-TV giant Canal+ and Cloudflare. In that instance, the court rebuffed Canal+ when the broadcaster requested staggering daily penalties of €50,000 per site. The court similarly concluded that Cloudflare was only obligated to take reasonable measures, which it had fulfilled by implementing restrictions through its CDN.
The legal pressure does not stop there, as alternative infrastructure providers are facing similar scrutiny. The Swiss-based DNS resolver Quad9 is next in line for judicial review. According to information provided by the Quad9 foundation, beIN Sports is seeking a penalty of €10,000 per domain, per day, which would accumulate to an astonishing €580,000 a day across the targeted domains. Quad9’s legal posture differs significantly from the VPN providers and Cloudflare, however, as the non-profit DNS resolver has not implemented any blocks against the disputed domains at all, arguing that doing so falls outside its operational remit as a neutral recursive resolver. A judicial decision regarding beIN’s request against Quad9 is anticipated later this month.
Appeals Court Hits Pause on VPN Dispute
The refusal of the Paris court to issue financial penalties is not the only obstacle rightsholders have faced in their broader campaign to curb piracy through non-traditional intermediaries. Alongside the battle over enforcement penalties, the VPN providers are actively fighting the underlying legality of the blocking orders themselves, and that separate legal track has recently been granted significant breathing room.
Late last year, NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost filed formal appeals against one of the earliest VPN site-blocking orders ever issued in France, which was originally secured by the French professional football league, the LFP, back in May 2025.
At the direct request of the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal issued an order on September 30 bringing that specific case to a temporary halt. Rather than forging ahead and issuing its own ruling on the merits of the VPN appeal, the appellate court decided to suspend proceedings until France’s highest court of ordinary jurisdiction, the Cour de cassation (Supreme Court), renders its decisions on pending appeals concerning a series of earlier, foundational rulings.
These pivotal rulings, which were handed down in March and May of this year, upheld site-blocking orders that Canal+ had previously obtained against major DNS providers. In the March litigation, tech giants including Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco lost their initial appeals regarding DNS blocking mandates. Unwilling to let the matter rest, several of those DNS providers escalated the dispute to the Supreme Court, where the legality of the practice is now under high-stakes review.
While the Paris Court of Appeal acknowledged that the technical and corporate nature of the DNS cases is not identical to the ongoing VPN dispute, it determined that there is a profound degree of legal overlap between the two controversies, justifying a judicial pause.
"Despite the differences, namely that the seven decisions under appeal concern DNS providers rather than VPNs, and that they were issued at the request of the Canal Plus companies rather than LFP and LFP1, the present case has many legal questions in common with the rulings under appeal before the [Supreme Court]," the appeals court stated in its freeze order.
The core legal questions shared across both sets of cases include determining precisely which categories of digital intermediaries can be legally compelled to assist in halting online piracy, whether France’s national site-blocking legislative framework fully complies with overarching European Union law, the evidentiary standards required to properly prove digital copyright infringements, and the precise legal threshold for when blocking measures can be deemed truly proportionate.
Although a definitive timeline for when the Supreme Court will issue its rulings remains unavailable, the Paris Court of Appeal is convinced that the high court’s eventual determinations will carry decisive weight and directly impact the trajectory of the VPN litigation.
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